Okay, I admit it: you're all talking way over my head. Reading the pages upon pages of guides and faqs and posts has not helped. I do have a headache, however. Here's my situation: 1. I want to make and use copies of my CDs (just ordinary audio CDs you might buy off the shelf at what I used to call a record store). 2. Quality is all that matters. 3. My current CD-R/W is on its last legs. I'll replace with a DVD player with burning capability. (Probably both + and - R/RW.) 4. Can I burn CDs on to a DVD and have them play in a run of the mill home DVD player that says it can play DVD-R? If so, I'd think I'd be able to fit 5 or 6 CDs on a single DVD-R, no? 5. If not, would a good CD writer be better than a DVD writer if I'm restricted to writing to CD's for my audio? Thanks a lot folks. And please go easy on this old man.
For getting Audio onto DVD, you ideally need a DVD-Audio authoring application. This will give you 6 hours of music at CD quality, or 12 hours if you use the lossless MLP packing. Problem is you will need tospend at least $4500 on this. You will also need a DVD player that is DVD-A capable. Most are not, but a lot of the newer ones are. I can recommend the Limit DVD9900SE very highly, and it's around £200. To write using a DVD-Video package just will not give you the flexibility you are looking for, as it is primarily for video so you have to include "video black" or the disc won't play. If quality is what you are looking for, then spend the money. It's the only way.
There is another way to go. If you write in CD Quality you can get away with a $500 app called discWelder Steel by Minnetonka Audio (see www.discwelder.com) whilst this won't give you full DVD-A range, you will be quite able to author 6 albums to a single DVD that will play on the desktop box I mentioned earlier. If you need more info, email me direct and I will try to help out. Address is neilwilkes@opusproductions.com & we do this sort of thing for a living. No problems sharing information with you, so ask away.
I don't know much about DVD-Audio / SACD yet as for my needs it is overkill. If you're ready to pay that much money for DVD-A stuff you can also get a silent PC with a decent soundcard (e.g. nforce2 onboard sound or some m-audio card) as replacement for your DVD player. With this you could: for audio storage/playback - rip + encode losslessly to at least 1 big hdd (120 GB+) so you'll have a big hardware jukebox or us Musepack as best lossy codec - write any audio that can be played back by PC (Windows) audio players to DVD-R(W) with your main PC resulting in many hours of music on one disk and play it back with your "stereo PC" (must have a DVD drive then). - integrate it in your home network to access all audio files stored on your PCs for Video/DVD use - play back DVDs - capture TV to HDD (maybe compressed on the fly) and burn to CD-R(W) or DVD-R(W) if needed Depending on how much processing power (-> on the fly DivX encoding?), video capabilities (-> gaming?) and features (CD-R(W)/DVD combo or DVD-R(W) drive ?) you want you can get (build) this for a few 100 $.
Don't forget also that if you get DVD-A capable, with MLP encoding you can fit 12 hours of CD quality music onto a single DVD, with the benefits of having your DVD-A player hooked up to your main stereo. This will sound much better IMO than any computer based system. After all, it's the audiophile market that DVD-A/SACD is aimed at. DVD-A really is worth the expenditure, especially when you take into account that you can freely mix wordlength/samplerates between your tracks. IE, you could have some at 24/192, 24/96, 24/48 all the way down to 16/44.1 and all on the same disc! But I'm sure you get the idea. I've been into DVD-A for a while now, and am only beginning to understand it's potential. There's so much to learn. Anything I can do to help, just ask!
Oh - you already know a lot about this stuff IMO. Congrats for your new senior member status BTW. About PC solution vs. DVD-A capable DVD player: With a PC you can get the same quality, at least if you use a soundcard with digital out. Then you can buy the best D/A converter available ... But believe me - there are really great soundcards out there (forget Creative). Plus, the PC sollution can do much more. High resolution/multichannel audio, lossless compressed? - no problem! And all software you need is free (legally). BTW: The original post was about archiving from audio CDs so there's nothing to gain by using high resolution in this case.
