Roland Storch wrote on Fri, 31 March 2006 02:28 |
A friend ppinted me to the XRCD from JVC and I took a look at their webside.
They state: xrcd is the optimization of CD mastering and manufacturing. The care and time put into the creation of an xrcd far exceeds that of any other compact disc.
Is it only marketing or what stands behind that?
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This is what they were formerly calling the K2 process. It's marketing if by reading the description you thus presume that no other replicator has taken the time to develop proprietary systems for quality replication. The description sounds impressive- but as a former replication (sony) guy I've always felt that the plant should be like a straight piece of wire (pick your flavor). The idealistic goal is this:What comes out of the plant should sound like what went in. Not better, not worse, but the same. And, as others will confirm, the performance of the resulting discs will be influenced by plating chemistry in the stamper room and replication machine performance as much as it is the signal feed process.
What JVC did for the industry at that time was to generate competitive attention to the signal feed process. There are other proprietary systems and processes in use elsewhere. Not all of them are touted publicly. I don't think any of them use the now extinct Sony PCM 9000 M/O drive noted on JVC's description. At Sony Disc Manufacturing we had the task of satisfying the specifications of Sony Music in a multiplant environment. Not easy when four, I mean three, oh, no wait, now it's two plants had different generations of replication lines. Our non-Sony customers benefitted because we then applied lessons learned to everything we replicated. There wasn't a special "inhouse" signal feeder.
However, (as I brutally learned the day our plant closed) the customers (Brokers, mostly) were more interested in haggling over the cost of each disc than talking about sound quality or value of customer service. We had one huge replication account that was lost to an Asian replicator for a price difference of a half cent per disc.