Purity is a must with blank CDs...: Baykomm - Bayer Communication Center

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Purity is a must with blank CDs...

Scratches, extreme temperatures on car dashboards, stickers on the wrong side or even pen markings - any of these things can cause a CD to experience momentary lapses or, in a worst-case scenario, lose all the data it is carrying.

The only 24-speed recordable CD-R on the planet.

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The only 24-speed recordable CD-R on the planet.

Yet often enough, the devil lies in the details: "Just a few incorrectly written bits among billions are enough to make a self-burned CD-R worthless," says Gerben Borsje from the Dutch storage media specialist MMore, which has carved out leading positions in a number of European markets in just a short period of time. "We want to expand these leadership positions through the only 24-speed recordable CD-R on the planet," says Borsje proudly.

A frequent cause of CD printing errors is impurity in the plastic into which the information is burned in microscopic detail. "It is a diamond's purity that makes it so valuable," explains Borsje. "When producing blank CDs, purity ensures data security." And since he's not willing to compromise, his company relies exclusively on high-tech plastic from Bayer "Our products are 'made of Makrolon' - whether it's CD-Rs or DVD-Rs. And we write that on all of them - as a seal of quality, so to speak." This makes sense.

Together with Philips, Bayer pioneered CD production technology in 1982. Thus it's no wonder that the company is a world leader in optical storage media. It is a giant and booming market. 100 million playable CD-Rs were sold in Europe in 1997. That number has since surpassed the 1 billion threshold. "Practically everyone holds Makrolon in their hands every day - they just don't know it," says Bayer CD expert Reiner Vesper. "Manufacturers don't just make CDs and those kinds of products out of this material, but also eyeglasses and car headlight lenses. The list of applications goes on and on."

Speaking of applications: If you'd like to store music or other data on a blank disc, there's some specialist terminology you should be familiar with:

A CD-R has to be sealed by the burner before it can be played in a conventional CD player. It is then no longer possible to record on this disc again (an exception is CD-RWs, which can be overwritten up to 1,000 times).
The disc-at-once function is important when there should be no breaks between songs (e.g. for live concerts).
Major drop-outs on the readable side of a CD/CD-R lead to disruptions during playback.
Certain burning programs offer a delayed recording - or multisession - feature for CD-Rs, allowing new information to be attached to sections that have already been burned.
On the fly means that a CD can be recorded by your burner directly from the CD-ROM drive of your computer, without your first having to save the songs or data on your hard drive.
Pits are the tiny grooves found on the recorded side of a CD. The laser reads the data from the inside outwards on a continuous basis.
With the track-at-once function, each song is recorded separately, leaving the customary breaks between songs.

More information on CD burning is available on an MP 3 audio file (720 kB).