2x / 4x duplication problems

[apryan]

Hi folks,
We are having problems duplicating clients media. We currently have 3 duplication towers, one with 2x drives, the other two with 4x type drives. I have been getting rather confused over the whole 2x / 4x speeds. All towers are 1:7 typed standalone units.

The question is, will duplication of dvds work if a client gives us a 2x disk and we put it in a 4x duplication system with 4x blank disks? From my understanding, the reader can read it at any speed but the 4x speed has to do with recording it. Thus we should be able to take any speed disk and output.

The problem occured this past week where we had placed what we think was a 2x disk in the reader (ROM) drive and had 7 blank 4x media in the 7 DVD-R drives. All of them when ran at once had a 'pixilation' and 'crackly' audio effect when playing them back. When we just did up to 3 copies, the copies turned out perfically. No flaws, but when we went to try to duplicate a 4th, it started the same effect that the 7 did.

All our drives are pioneers and we are stuggling to find out if the problem is on the media end or on our drive end. We use to rely on 2x media from reltek which worked out fine, until they went outta stock.


Any suggestions or help you can provide would be greatful.
thanks
-anthony

[axis45]

Hi,
From my experience most of these types of problems are caused by cheap substandard media, sounds like you are getting mixed results,sometimes succesful sometimes not,if I were you I'd always use a quality media like Mitsui as a master for duplication purposes-the other possibility is that you could have a fault on the mainboard but I think that is less likely.
Whether the dvd in the dvd rom was burned at 2x or 4x I would think is irrelevant-
Axis45

[apryan]

Yup, we weren't having these problems when we stuck to one of our other medias. We use to use the Riltek DVD-r's and they worked perfectly on every tower and in every deck. Up until reciently when they ran outta stock, we were using them. We had to switch to keep our jobs flowing but doing so caused alot of problems.

Any other suggestions you can provide would be helpful. We did recieve a reply from the control manufacture for our duplication towers, however they haven't provided us with a good reason for this.

thanks