How well do the current crop of CD-RW drives (see WFTD above CD-RW) work in making audio discs with programs like Master List CD and such?
Actually, some of them work fine. In fact, we’ve found the Ricoh 6201 rewritable mechanism to be one of the most reliable of all the CD writers we sell.
Current technology limits CD-RW drives to a maximum write speed of 2x, which in light of our past experience with systems is no problem. Early understanding of writing CD’s indicated that, in theory, higher write speeds would yield more reliable results (2x was better than 1x, but 4x was better than 2x). In practice, however, we are finding that 2x CD writing produces the most consistently stable audio CD’s. Our sources at companies like Digidesign have numerous theories on why this is so, but the bottom line is that 2x works great, and the Ricoh 2x rewritable mechanism works as well as any we’ve seen.