Microboards' 8X Copy Writer A2D - CD recording system - Statistical Data Included

Emedia Professional, July, 1999 by Stephen F. Nathans

synopsis: MicroBoards' 8X CopyWriter A2D is everything you ever wanted in a CD recording system and nothing more. Like preceding generations of the product, it's a self-contained unit, with a simple, fixed set of functions and it's state-of-the-art in terms of performance and speed. Still offering the same no-nonsense one-recorder, one-reader, 2.1GB hard drive for image and track staging, the new A2D combines Plextor's coming-to-every-duplicator-near-you PlexWriter 8X recorder and the audio-extraction-optimized Plextor UltraPlex 32X CD-ROM drive, An Editor's Choice winner like its nearest ancestor [under the ACS brand), this 8X duplicator achieves full disc CD-to-CD copies in under ten minutes.

the RIAA would have you believe that duping copyrighted music to CDR for any purpose, personal or profitable, is the road to hell. On the personal, not-for-profit front, they say CD-to-CD copying is a copyright violation not worthy of suit, but a violation nonetheless. So what else could the true penalty be but a sojourn down the river Styx?

As someone who learned early in life that he'd never write the songs that make the young girls cry, or ever possess the music-performing talent to sing or play them, my best recourse was always to tape them. So imagine my joy when I discovered CD-R and realized I could start delivering my crafted compilations on CD. Forget hellfire and damnation--4 thought I'd gone to heaven.

But what I quickly figured out was that the road to heaven leads through Purgatory. I took heart from Dante's notion of "good grief" because with mid-90s CDR, that's all you had; in those days CD recording could be a real nightmare. Combining an old CMS 2X with a disastrous early incarnation of Incat's Easy CD Pro for Mac, the feeble audio extraction utility in FWB's otherwise fine CD Toolkit, and a sluggish, memory-addled 68K Performa, I didn't stand a chance. It took me a day and a half to burn my first successful track, and another day (and many blown $15 discs) to grind out a vaguely acceptable CD. Making the young women cry was hardly an issue by then--this was enough to make a grown man cry.

But it's no longer crying time in CDR.. Three years down the line, we've got faster processors, capacious hard drives for easy image building, fast CD-ROM drives and much-matured audio extraction tools, faster recorders, drag-and-drop packet-writing, and easily mastered premastering software. But these are all incremental changes, and the predictability and ease they bring to CD recording was at least foreseeable, if still unattainable, in those antediluvian days when I first got in the game. When CD recorders were the size of a room a few years before, casual desktop burning was almost certainly unforeseeable.

Still, if I hadn't seen the previous two generations of its noble ancestry, nothing could have prepared me for the power, speed, and simplicity of MicroBoards' new CopyWriter A2D CD duplication system. Beyond the buffer underruns, the system memory machinations, slowness, and general unreliability of CD recording before the last two years, what was often so annoying about disc-making was how many obscure and high-end functions the software made you wade through before you got to the small subset of its possible operations that you wanted in the first place. And maybe the greatest thing about the current A2D and its immediate antecedents is that if CDR is a handy means to an end for you--say, you've got software to backup, data discs or prototypes to copy, an old LP collection to preserve, and you want to mix some fun CD tracks on the side--it's everything you ever wanted in a CD recording system and nothing more. Like its two predecessors, it's a self-contained unit, with a simple, fixed set of functions-although even those can be extended to the full range of CD recording available in say, Easy CD Creator or Toast if you plug it into your PC or Mac with a SCSI cable.

Also like earlier models, the new A2D is state-of-the-art in terms of performance and speed. Still offering the same nononsense one-recorder, one-reader, 2.1GB hard drive for image and track staging, the A2D packs the latest and greatest in read-write technology. It combines Plextor's coming-to-every-duplicator-near-you PlexWriter 8X recorder and the audio-extraction-optimized Plextor UltraPlex 32X CD-ROM drive. The last disc burned in testing was a DIRECT WRITE CD-to-CD copy of a nearly full (73 minutes, 48 seconds) burned audio disc, and the A2D accomplished this task in 9 minutes, 51 seconds. So let's see: my first disc took three days; three days minus nine minutes, 51 seconds ... well, I'll just leave the math to the engineers.

following the upgrade path

OK, enough gushing for now. The immediately preceding version of MicroBoards' CopyWriter A2D is based on the same duplication system sold by ACS Innovations as the COMPRO 4X CD Master, which received the Editor's Choice designation in the January 1998 edition of EMedia Professional. That system combined Matsushita's solid 4X recordable drive with an 8X reader and performed effortlessly up to spec. [An earlier 2X/4X version was relatively problematic, succumbing to occasional track-clipping and erratically functioning input jacks.)