various - blank, recordable CD's

Author's product rating:   

Advantages:	Memorex rules :  They produce affordable, high - quality discs .
Disadvantages:	Most other brands just don't do it for me .

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

I'm sure that everyone who has owned or used a CD-R or CD-RW drive is familiar with some of the following profanities:

"Dammit, there's not enough buffer space!"
"The disc won't finalize!"

Or, my personal favorite:

"I bought twenty of these discs and only THREE of them work?!"

You see, shopping for CD-R or CD-RW discs is the same as shopping for blank cassette tapes was back in the day. Some are going to be more expensive, some will be the store brand, and some will be disgustingly inexpensive - but oddly enough, the medium-priced brands will generally work the best.

I used to do a lot of home recording with blank audio cassettes, and paid quite a bit over the years for various brands. The store brands were generally not worth a crap, as they either cut the data short, had horrible background noise, or wore out quickly. I quickly learned to bypass those without a second glance.

I then made the mistake of thinking that buying the most recognizable brand name would mean the best disc, regardless of the cost. WRONG! I still have a personal distaste for any recording product that Sony or Phillips produce, because these also tended to wear out quickly. The quality of the recordings was outstanding, yes, but what's the point if I'm only going to be able to listen to my creations for a few short weeks?

Finally, I discovered that the mid-range is generally going to be my best bet regardless of what type of media I'm interested in. This is also true of blank CDs, which I have recently had a need for (Mom just bought a new computer system with a kick-ass CD-RW drive - YEAH!)

Mom brought home a stack of "Wal-Mart Special" discs - gross. The damned things didn't last for five playbacks before they started skipping, hissing, and breaking down. "Forget this!" I said as I tossed the worthless discs into the trash can and went to shop for myself.

Wal-Mart is notorious for not carrying a wide selection of products - or so is the case with the location fifteen miles from my house. We're a tiny hick community, so who cares if we can get our hands on decent high-tech products or not? Right.

I looked around in the Electronics department and found the cheap Teon discs that Mom had brought home. "These can't be the only ones they've got," I muttered. I turned around and, on the OTHER side of the aisle, spotted several other brands - all located just above my eye level! I'm of average height at five feet, seven inches, so this I find to be quite ridiculous.

I saw Memorex CD-R discs in a 50-pack spindle for twenty dollars. "Let's see...these are the standard sized discs...800 megs of data...twenty bucks...yeah, let's try these."

Sadly to say, they were actually cheaper per disc than the crappy ones we had tried first! I've always liked and trusted Memorex products - from the first time I used their blank audio cassettes for home recordings - and so buying this product was not much like diving into unchartered waters.

Lo and behold, they record smoothly, without underrunning buffer space or finalization errors. The playback quality is rich, with all the various tones, bass lines, melodies, and other nuiances of modern day musical recordings. These discs are long-lasting - it's very hard to put scratches in them that are too much for most CD players (home stereo, car audio, OR CD-ROM drive) to read through. Hell, I even like the enormous amount of space I've got on the label side of the disc for writing in titles with a felt-tipped pen!

If you're going to get CD-R (or CD-RW) discs, I highly recommend Memorex as your first try. They are generally going to cost a bit more than store brands and other "cheap knock-offs," but in some cases you might be surprised to find that, per disc, they're cheaper! But, don't let that fool you: Memorex discs are generally of a high quality, with a long life to satisfy users.

Okay. Memorex is my favorite. But, what don't I like?

I don't like "Teon" (Whatever the hell THAT might be) because of the above problems. I don't like Sony's discs because they generally do not have a very long playback life, and a good fifteen to twenty percent of the discs in the various packages will not finalize. (Some of this is due to CD writing errors, but some of it is also to be blamed on the disc itself.) Office Depot puts out a CD-R disc that is decent, but again we encounter the recording error problems. (Even so, these discs are fine if you are saving something that you have to replace frequently, such as installation files to various programs.)

Honestly, I can't say that anything but Memorex has worked so far. If I cannot find these particular discs, I will obviously try something else but, at the moment, they are fairly cheap and widely available. I definitely suggest that you give them a try if you're still looking for something that will suit your needs without the frustration of error messages and damaged discs.