It's a matter of degree. you can go down to compusa and buy the cheapest setup possible and it will burn and it will play and all is good. We are discussing the finer details of creating the best discs consistently and reliably that will be used for manufacturing. I spend a lot of time mastering material for people that spend all of their money on a project. I don't want to drop the ball burning the final disc, as most don't. I want to get back what i put in. Because there are many variables in peoples setups, it's not as easy as it should be, unless you have a Sadie or a Sonic. These are setup to work as a unit. They come packaged and tested to work right. If you don't have these then you have to piece something together that will get the same results so YOU are now R&D. If you find this frustrating, well it can be, then pay for a system that has done all the research and has been tested. If you don't have the money to buy one of these systems, then read a learn by our mistakes, or not. What's the best microphone?, depends. what's the best mic pre?, depends on the microphone and what's being recorded. When you combine many things, variables exist that must be takin into account. system, software, interface, burner, media. within these variables there are sub variables. System software and speed, interfaces (scsi, firewire, usb, ide, atapi). burner brand and model and speed, media type and speed. Lots of variables all producing different results, some large, some small. That's why we call this mastering, attention to the finer details.
but then... I did what I thought I'd never do... I bought a PC for burning CDs... Sterling Sound uses mostly the fairly expensive Sequioa software now as an alternative to Sonic, which makes great sounding CDs. The good news is that Samplitude and Sequioa use the same algorhythms for red-book cd-burning. And even the cheapest version of Samplitude does the trick. I seriously recommend it to everybody.
