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For what it's worth, I have found that blue-dye silver discs, I prefer Toyo-Yuden just because I 
have years of good experiences (successful burns, near-universal playability), seem to work best as 
playback media. In fussy car players, in old home players, in early DVD players, etc. I also have 
heard similar things to what Corey heard in a gold MAM vs. a blue-dye T-Y, played back in a mid-90's 
vintage Philips CD player. Played back via my Tascam CD recorder, I couldn't hear any difference. I 
am guessing that older CD players have trouble reading the gold-backed CDs and thus either more 
error correction is going on or for some reason jitter is being induced, or some other digital-realm 
thing is going on. My conclusion was to pursue the same recommendations as Corey -- blue-dye/silver 
for playback, gold-back for archiving (although I highly recommend a maintained hard-drive archiving 
strategy).

-- Tom Fine

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Corey Bailey" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, November 11, 2010 2:43 AM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Falcon Optical Media


In 2002 I was given the task of archiving some
�", 15ips music masters for a client who was very
specific about the delivery requirements and even
the CD burner to be used. The burner had to be
either a certain model Plextor or an early model
Phillips (a 2X burner). The CD media for playback
had to be Taiyo Yuden brand cyanine (green) dye
CD-R's. The archival media for the flattened
files was to be Kodak gold. All of this came from
the debate at the time that cyanine, although the
least stable was the best sounding of the three
available dyes and that gold-layered CD's were, in fact, the worst sounding.

This prompted me to perform my own listening
tests and indeed, I was able to detect a slight
difference between a gold-layered CD-R and a
silver layered one. The gold-layered CD-R sounded
a bit harsher in the mid range to me than the
silver layered samples. I tried product with all
three dye types but the audible difference to me
seemed to be the reflective layer more than the
dye type. I had three other professional
engineers listen to the sample discs and two
reported the same results while the third
professed to not hearing a difference.

About six months later, I tried the same test
with a different genre of music that had also
been sourced from 15ips masters and noticed the same result.

Since then I offer silver layered CD's for the
clients playing copies with the disclaimer that
they are not considered archival quality.

Cheers!

Corey
Corey Bailey Audio Engineering


At 04:45 PM 11/9/2010, you wrote:
>It seems that Falcon hit the world with a new production facility in the UAE in 1998 and Bernie 
>Grundman was using them as of 1998 according to what I read on Gearslutz.com.
>
>My challenge is that one of the last two MAM-A dealers here in Canada is switching to Falcon and 
>has apparently switched the RCMP already and it is becoming most difficult to get the gold archival 
>MAM-A discs here.
>
>I guess I could self-import them from Am-Dig, or even direct from MAM-A, but that is a lot of work 
>and expense.
>
>Yes, I try to get most of my clients over to downloaded files or hard-drive delivery, but that 
>exacerbates the problem for the few remaining clients who really, really want CDs of grandmother's 
>wedding.
>
>Has anyone used Falcon CD-R and DVD-R blanks? What has been your impression?
>
>It seems the recordable optical media business is another submerging technology. <sigh>
>
>Thanks!
>
>Richard
>--
>Richard L. Hess                   email: [log in to unmask]
>Aurora, Ontario, Canada           (905) 713 6733     1-877-TAPE-FIX
>http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm
>Quality tape transfers -- even from hard-to-play tapes.