ACS Innovations' 4X CD Master CD duplicator

Emedia Professional, Jan, 1998 by Stephen F. Nathans

Today's world teems with tragedy and injustice. Fires, floods, famines, and fumblings of jurisprudence are facts of life. Most of us suffer privately such public misfortunes but accept that we can't do much about them. So goes it with MCA Records' long-standing refusal to make its epic six-record set, The Complete Buddy Holly, available to the CD world.

Until now, that is. Given that my CD world begins and ends with what I hear in my own living room, I'm proud to say that I reversed 13 years of injustice on a rainy Saturday in September 1997, when I plugged ACS Innovations' 4X CD Master standalone CD duplicator into the wall, connected its LINE-IN jack with the audio outs on my Technics stereo, and transferred 120 two-and-a-half minute pieces of musical history by the late, great rock `n' roll pioneer from crackling, aging vinyl to all-digital, ageless CD-R.

Write completed. Disc ejected. The plane stayed in the air. Buddy Holly lives.

Okay, ACS Innovations' 4X CD Master CD duplicator can't raise the dead. But the 4X CD Master can do much more than extract and copy audio, writing all CD formats at state-of-the-art 4X speed, in stable, reliable disc-at-once mode. However, the 4X CD Master is optimized for all audio copying tasks, managed with a six-button keypad and an impressively simple and direct set of function menus that make it an ideal choice for the novice user whose CD-R needs don't extend past rapid disc-to-disc copying, creating compilation audio discs, and converting analog sound signals (from tapes, LPs, and the like) to digital for recording to CD.

The 4X CD Master may be great for novices, but this PC-Free CD duplicator packs the hardware punch necessary to back up its soundly streamlined form and function and holds many features attractive to all sorts of professionals, too. Its no-bigger-than-a-breadbox enclosure houses a 2GB hard drive for data-staging, an 8X Matsushita CD-ROM drive, and a 4X Matsushita CD recorder that records a full 650MB, 74-minute CD-ROM in 18 minutes. All this, plus a SCSI connection that lets the drive connect to PCs and function as an external CD recorder using standard PC premastering software.

ACS Innovations' 4X CD Master--recently upgraded to 4X/8X from its first-draft 2X/4X predecessor--carries a $1,995 price tag for single-unit purchases, and that price drops as low as $1,450 for bulk purchases of ten or more. Owners of the 4X CD Master's predecessor--an otherwise-physically identical model with Matsushita's 4X read drive and 2X CD recorder--can return their machines for a $299 hardware and firmware upgrade.

QUICK-STARTING THE CD MUSTER: NOTHIN' TO

ACS Innovations is no stranger to CD recording; the company has offered high-value, low-cost bundlings of Matsushita CD-Recordable products for some time, the CD Master duplicator and a hardware/software package featuring Matsushita's latest 4X write/8X read CD recorder are only ACS's latest entries. The documentation included with the CD Master seems sparse at first glance, consisting of a 22-page "Quick Start" guide for operating the duplicator, and 12-page "Instruction Manuals" for the read and write drives. But the guides prove more than sufficient for such an easily operated device.

The contents of the package are the CD Master unit, power cord, a half-dozen CD-R blanks in a handy pouch, and the previously-mentioned manuals. Once you have the unit plugged in and switched on--which is really all it takes to get it up and running--the CD Master will scan all SCSI addresses for attached units and for the assigned locations of the on-board CD-ROM drive and recorder.

To duplicate a disc, simply pop open the tray on the upper drive and insert the disc to be copied. Then place a blank CD-R disc in the tray on the lower drive--marked 4X write--and, using the arrow keys on the membrane keypad, highlight "DIRECT WRITE," answer "YES" to the following prompt, and the CD Master gets down to business. The DIRECT WRITE function performed admirably on both the data and audio sides. The first disc burned in testing, using ACS' bundled media, was the EMedia Professional 1997 backup disc, which copied flawlessly, with all distinct sessions intact. The disc's 520MB of data burned in less than 16 minutes on the CD Master; the next disc copied in "DIRECT WRITE" mode, an audio disc that clocked in at 72:30, was written to Mitsui Gold/Gold media in roughly 19 minutes and played back smoothly. Capable of reliably copying nearly four full 650MB discs per hour, the CD Master makes a capable duplicating tool for all sorts of tasks, be it short-run production of a training application or database for in-house business use, doing a limited run of a title prototype for shopping to prospective publishers, or making quick-and-easy backup copies of valued discs.

The CD Master also duplicates Video CD, Sony Playstation CD, CD-ROM XA, and most other CD formats. One surprising feature of the CD Master that became apparent in audio playback testing was the solid quality of the built-in stereo speakers, which prove especially useful in fashioning audio compilations for track previewing and add to the product's standalone appeal.