Falcon Pro DVD-R Archival Gold

Personally I like their design Maybe I am a bit strange
But I wouldn't buy them even for the tenth of their present price...

So there really fools gold ?
I can not see from the picture about the reflective material. But I can say that bottom color says very little. MPO's GOLD media is real gold and only has a darker purple bottom.


It would make sense with some past comments about MBIL that they had no gold dvd-r available as product themselves.

OFFTOPIC to Pepst I received your p.m. but my p.m. box is really screwed. Going to see if I can find tomorrow some time to give you a e-mail.
The cdfreaks mailbox is stuffed to 99%. They should make them larger. At least for longtime members.

Their reflective layer is probably some combination of silver and gold layer (2 layers, silver is the upper one). But medium's bottom looks exactly like common MBI's DVD, gold MPOs look different.
BTW did you ever test gold MPO DVD-R? Are they as good as gold MPO DVD+Rs? I have got one gold MPO DVD-R medium but I am not going to burn it in foresight future since they are extremely rare.

Silver up one is really no good idea and is very unlikely. Your opening a can of worms while hardly winning anything that way. The only option that I can think of is that tehy could have used kodak's pattented silver & gold alloy.
Never tested the MPO GOLD DVD-R's. The +R's are nice I do know a stock of -R's still. Only reason that's holding me off is lack of money

Yeah that silver+gold layer doesn't make sense but what can you expect from Kodak media? I don't think that gold layer is better than silver at all. Gold layer is good only for marketing bullshits. Look at MAM-E media, they were a crap and even 24k gold layer couldn't save them.

OT: I will get some Princo 16x media (the last pieces in Slovakia ) next week, I will send them to you ASAP.

Theoretically 24k Gold has and advantage over silver when it comes to life time. That's no marketing mumbo jumbo for needed. The problem however is that in real life situation that so many other things are influencing the quality, and that some manufacturers perform better as others. This has resulted in, that so far gold has not shown it's superiority and turned into a marketing gimmick.

However gold also comes with much extra problems. Problems you have to overtake from day one. Using a MID which was designed for the use with silver on a disc that now uses gold should not be the option.

But medium life time is still limited by dye life time. Gold (or platinum...) layer with 100 years life time is pretty useless when the life time of dye is at most 10-17 years (in case of quality legendary media like 1-4x PVC, TY, Maxell).

Is the dye lifetime 10-17 years ?.That's a question that can be debated and under what conditions was that measured.

All I can say is that gold has a small advantage and that's not because of the reason they said befor. About it being less reactive as silver. No it's, because with the correct production technique the Gold layer would slow down diffusion of material that could react with the dye. This results in a longer lifetime for the dye.

The exact reason why Verbatim slapped gold on their silver layer. Covering it off with gold should allow less diffusion of material to the dye (and silver), while it has the reflective quality of silver.
This exactly shows why a gold disc with silver on top is not the option to go.
Because you allready used gold for protecting the dye but by putting it as reflector you might have created problems with reflectivity. The silver howevers sits completely useless at top while it did add costs.
So the only reason that I can think of for the Kodaks if they use gold is that they might use kodaks alloy mixture.
How much did that bring for cd-r's. Very little, so little that it's not worth the added extra costs unless your purely talking about a marketing gimmick.

And I wouldn't put PVC there for a lifetime of 10-17 years. Seeing the amount of Pioneer media that has gone bad in places with high humidity.

"3. "Gold" is known to be used as a marketing tool to sell snake oil. For example, it's widely used in high-end audio cables, with the funny argument that it would have better electrical conductivity, which is a blatant lie as copper and silver are much better electrical conductors than gold. - This marketing lie has been so widely spread that thousands of people are convinced that Gold is the best conductor. But I disgress."

Gold is used in audio cables and connections not because of its conductive properties but because of its resistance to corrosion.

300,000 CD-Rs ran from August 2007 to present. (-:

I have been using TY since 1999 when I started here. We changed to Verbatim back in 2002. In 2007 we began having problems with Verbatim's top coating. Our artwork would not adhear to the CD-Rs so we ended up changing to TDK.
Anyway, be advised that Falcon may be making some of the other CD-Rs you're using now, or have used in the past. They hold a license with some Japanese manufacturers.
BTW, the TDKs have an average error rate of 1 out of 100.
After 9 years it seems our Kodak gold as well as our quantegy gold disc still work just fine. Some of the TY don't read at all now, and none of the ritek we have work. These have all been kept in drawers in cases out of harms way. We have DAT tape that still works better that some of these CDRs that claim to have a shelf life of 100 years. They barely made 10.

Strangely enough, I have masters on Kodak Gold, MAMA and Mitsui (MAMA) as well as some on TY that are removed and replaced daily that I haven't had any trouble from. It seems they may last longer with use almost. Though I know it's not true. With any CD-R DVD-R ect, if you want it to last, keep it in a controlled environment in a case.

Welcome to the forum, Warbox.
[OT]Well, that's the way it should be in an honest world. It's not the way it is . Specially in high-end audio cables. The manufacturer may have used gold for better resistance to corrosion in the first place, but the selling arguments of the product are far from that one. It's always the nonsense about how "better" those cables sound and how gold is the best conductor (which is totally wrong). It's easy to see that most brands and manufacturers using gold are not in it for the superior resitance to corrosion, but for the profit they can make out of gullible consumers with some money to spend.

I'll disgress again and mention, about gold's superiority for corrosion in the case of high-end audio cables: I'm a musician, a sound engineer, and a hi-fi freak, that none of my audio cables has ever been gold plated and none has ever started corroding. The older ones are RCA cables I bought when I was 18, they are still rocking and I'm 47 today. And assuming the cables were corroding, even changing good quality 100% copper cables every 10 years would cost less than a pair of these fancy gold cables.
[/OT]

I see similar marketing lies in DVDR and CDR. And as I mentioned, who cares if the reflective layer lasts 100 years, if the dye doesn't.

I'm a musician myself and have been working in a studio for ten years and actually we have had cables corrode. Especially ones that have been sitting in the same studio for several years. The difference between gold connectors versus the other metal in our gear, is corrosion on the gold usually comes off easily with no pitting with a little contact cleaner and elbow grease. We have no cables that actually have gold as a conductor through the cable.

That's what caught my eye, I may be wrong but I've never seen a claim that a cable has any gold conductor wire. And in the 25 years I've been a musician, ten years od that working in a production studio, I've never seen a cable that has gold wire through the length of the cable. Gold connectors yes, gold wire no.
If some company is claiming that, then I'd probably be very doubtful of them and my tendency to be a "good consumer" would dissmiss it as BS almost instantly.

I'm still wanting to smack the guy next door int he back of the head for buying some generic shielded cables. They were shielded alright. To about 5 inches into the cable. I could hand wire better cables in my sleep.
BTW, I also run the duplication department here. Last week I just broke 300,000 discs since August of last year. I have tested a lot of disc I mean a-LOT. Even people's favorite brands don't stand up to the test of time. It's easy to make a claim like 100 years or more when you realize, no one will probably be around to even care either way. I'd bet even the best brands only last 10 or 20 years, depending on environment of course.

Back to cables though. I always buy a brand I trust, otherwise I make my own. At least that way I know what's inside. There are way too many cables and wires running around here that could wreck a session to be worrying if those cheap cables are crap or not. Here time is money. Deadlines have to be met or you'll loose clients to other studios or worse, miss out on thousands or even millions of dollars.

Gold cannot corrode at all, so I don't get it. If you imply I said differently, well, I didn't.
But enough with the cables, we're going way off topic. If you want to open a discussion about this, just open a thread an notify me. I'll be glad to join. I experienced absolutely zero detectable degradation over 4 years on correctly written, non-overspeeded premium media like MCC02RG20 (Verbatim), TDKG0002 (TDK), TTG02 (TDK), YUDEN000T02 (TDK, FUJI, Verbatim, unbranded), MCC004 (Verbatim), RICOHJPNR01 (Ricoh). If you have some actual data to share, please do. If none of what you used "standed up the test of time", maybe it's because you didn't use the right discs, the right burners, or the right burning methods. That's the whole point of the CDFreaks forum, to learn about those things.
Unless you're talking about user-induced degradation, of course (scratches, smudges, warping from bad storing etc..). That's indeed a problem, but that's a problem with any medium.

Most likely the TDK's your using if it has a TDK ATIP, as TDK doesn't make cd-r's themselves anymore.