dkp Posted August 20, 2004 Share Posted August 20, 2004 Our church may be purchasing a multiple-CD recording machine in the near future. Ideally, we will find one that would make multiple copies simultaneously. Any ideas on where to search for these and brands to look for/avoid would be much appreciated. General ideas on pricing would be helpful as well. Another point I'm researching: Would it be less expensive to purchase a dedicated machine or build a computer with 9 CD bays (forgive my lack of technical knowledge/language here). 1 bay would be for the original and the others for recording. David Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DrWho Posted August 20, 2004 Share Posted August 20, 2004 I would HIGHLY recommend going with TELEX. They call their duplication machines "Spinwise" and they have all sorts of models available. Here's a link: http://www.telex.com/Duplication/products.nsf/allpages/01A822BB5A0ACA9686256BC0005537AA We just purchased a 4-52NH for our church and we couldn't be happier. It cost us around $900. Do your shopping and you can probably find it for cheaper (I did a quick search on the web and found it for $940 through samash). I did another search for other random brand towers and they're about $700 for the same thing. Telex might cost a bit more than the other competitors, but the reliability and longevity of their products is very much worth the extra investment. I used to run the digital production studio at my church (i moved from Chicago to Grand Rapids and had to quit) and in the time I was there, we made thousands of CDs and never had any problems. Our church has a long history of using Telex products (before the cd era, we used Telex tape duplicators and those were amazing machines as well) and we will continue to use their products. I would highly discourage the use of any automated CD burning robot machine thing. Because they have moving parts, they are going to break and they need lots of maintenance (wow, my spelling is awful today). Using a bunch of burners in the computer is an interesting idea, but might not be the best in regards to price and functionality. When burning CDs in a computer, multitasking becomes a very risky thing because the pc is using it's own RAM as the buffer for the cd rom that is doing the burning. This means that your computer is going to be useless while the CDs are burning (I personally like to print labels and edit the database while burning the CDs...). Also, you're going to need to purchase some sort of CD burning software that will allow you to use multiple drives at once. Also, you will need a special motherboard to be able to support multiple IDE drives (I forget the number, but I think you can only have 4 IDE controllers on a single IDE insert on the board, and that means an additional 4 slaves for a total of 8, provided you have the right cables and jumper settings). You are also going to need to purchase a new power supply for your computer that will be able to give all the power needed to each of the cd-roms. Taking all this into account, I don't know if it would actually be cheaper...in the meantime, you're losing multitasking ability. Another thing that is nice about the towers is that they are portable. All you have to do is plug the tower into a power source, put in your master and your copies and then burn away. When special cd burning projects are going on at the church, we like having the flexibility to take the tower out of the studio and into the office where one of the secretaries can switch out and label the copies. Anyways, that's probably more information than you wanted to know, but let me know if you've got any more questions. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DrWho Posted August 20, 2004 Share Posted August 20, 2004 It sounds like your church is considering converting from tape production to cd production? If so, this is going to be a very good investment for you. CDs take less time to make, sound better, can be stored longer, and I've found that CDs sell more than tapes. If you're still thinking about producting tapes...telex also sells another product that lets you rip tapes straight off the computer. This would let you keep a digital copy on your computer from which you could burn your master cd and master tape. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dkp Posted August 21, 2004 Author Share Posted August 21, 2004 Thanks for all the information. I found a few on the internet yesterday after I made this post under the name "CD duplicators." It seems that there are a number of manufacturers that produce machine built solely for this purpose-many in the price range you mentioned. I don't recall seeing the brand you named, but I will do some more research over the next few weeks. If anything else comes to mind, please feel free to add it to the thread. Thanks again! David P.S. I'm not too far from you, DrWho, as I live just East of Flint. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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