With everything finished to what I thought was a reasonable degree of perfection, I headed off to the CD manufacturer. A week or so later, driving home with my first rush batch of CDs (hurried through the process in order to provide copies for sale at a hastily arranged gig in Chicago), I played the first CD on my car stereo. Disaster! Two tracks skipped. I almost turned around on the highway to go back to the factory... but realized there was nothing to be done before I flew to Chicago the next day. I played a few more CDs as the car crawled home through rush hour traffic. Same thing.
Oddly enough, once I got upstairs to my apartment, the CD played perfectly on my home stereo and on my Sony Discman. Mango came over to test the CD and it wouldn’t play on his car stereo either, so we determined it wasn’t my car stereo that was somehow at fault. After a few phone conversations with the CD manufacturer I learned something which defied logic but gave me hope: If a CD doesn’t play on some stereos, it is a manufacturing problem and not a problem with your master.
My master and the first batch of CDs had tested fine, but there was something wrong with them which didn’t show up on the testing equipment. Perhaps one round of testing had been skipped in order to get my rush order done on time. The manufacturer’s representative also confessed that they had had to remake the glass master from which the stampers are pressed, because the first glass master had been bad. I returned the rush order batch of CDs and they determined that yes, they were flawed. The manufacturer made a third glass master from my master and pressed the entire run of CDs, which this time were tried out on every piece of testing equipment they had. They were also played on numerous stereos in order to determine they were fine. Apparently they are, as I have shipped a bunch of these things and nobody has complained yet.
That, in a nutshell, is probably more than anyone ever wanted to know about how I made my CD. Whatever can go wrong just might maybe go wrong and no matter how much you plan your project, you will probably have to learn something new before you are done.
