THE PMCD (Pre Mastered Compact Disc)
By Edward Vinatea
November 20, 2007

The pre-master CD was originally developed jointly by Sonic Solutions and Sony. The PMCD had the advantage of being easily played on an ordinary CD player before it can be transferred to glass master.

A true PMCD contains the PQ code burst in the lead out area. For this reason, relatively few CD recorders are capable of making a true PMCD. In fact this format no longer exists because the drives and software to create true PMCDs also no longer exist.

Some CD pressing plants require disk-at-once CDrs to be accompanied by a hard copy printout of the PQ code information in order to document its authenticity, and thus to prevent confusion with ordinary recorded CDs which may be track-at-once (duped in real time).

In my opinion using a CD-R (Compact Disc Recordable) as a master is a better medium and more reliable than 1610 & 1630 pre-mastered tape (DDP), or any 4mm/8mm tape format.

The reason is due to magneto-optical technology which has no tape head friction. This doesn't mean that it doesn't have longevity and durability issues, but if it stored properly it has the potential to last a lot longer than tape.

Issues
While the manufacture of compact discs is done to stringent standards, economic pressures can force CD pressing plants to take shortcuts when material is supplied in a non-professional CD format (i.e., track-at-once, instead of disk-at-once CDs).

Some CD pressing plants will accept CDs recorded on ordinary track-at-once CD recorders, but the glass master might be made from an analog transfer (you lost a generation!) from the customer's CD. Other plants will not even accept such CDs.

The problem with track-at-once CDs is that there is a digital gap before each track selection and this interruption in digital data causes excessive errors during the glass mastering.

I use StageTech EC2 CD Error Checker for analyzing CDs of unknown heritage. All our PMCD's guaranteed to pass the MediaFORM CD-5900

For an interesting discussion about using a CD-R as a master, I highly recommend reading a thread from Gearslutz.com which is like a Wikipedia of all things audio and in my opinion, one of the best if not the best audio engineering and mastering forum. Go to What Format Does The ME Normally Deliver?

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