Is there any evidence or reasoning for this? I've heard this a ton on forums before - however, I'd love to see someone actually test this. Otherwise, it seems like an old wives tale.
I mean, the laser has a fixed amount of current running through it, regardless of how the CD is made.
It's been discussed to death already. Here's the reasoning:
Pressed CD's are made with a metal layer, which is highly reflective.
CD-R's are made with a dye layer, which is less reflective.
Older CD drives expect high reflectivity discs; they have problems detecting the signal from CD-R's.
The signal loss due to the low reflectivity means a higher read failure rate. This, in turn, means
the cd player has to do more re-tries to get a valid read. Thus, more wear and tear on the drive.
This is the same exact reason older cd players will not read CD-R discs. It's a known problem, tested to death by manufacturers when CD-R's first became available.
(You want the technical details? The zero-crossing detector amp in the lens assembly doesn't receive enough light from the less reflective cd-r's to reliably detect the pit transitions - not enough voltage from the detector to saturate the amp base. No, the amp isn't adjustable, either, though folks have tried.)
You wanna use CD-R's in your system, be my guest. Make note the BlueBMW and thesteve have replacement lasers, though, cause you'll need one. Soon.
I already understand all of this but...I'm just not buying it. What I've noticed with PCEs is that if the system loses track of the CDDA it will not come back until it loads again and sends you to the next CDDA track. Because of this you always know when a CD isn't reading right. When it loses track of data it will retry things again, maybe it loads slower, whatever, eventually it usually reads, so you don't always know when data loading isn't working right unless you are very familiar with the game and you know exactly how long everything is supposed to take. You always know when the CDDA drops out though.
Therefore, correct me if I'm wrong, if the game isn't dropping out on CDDA tracks it probably isn't having a very hard time reading the disc, no?
My Duo was brand new, out of the box, purchased from TZD about twelve years ago. I put in a couple CDRs and it immediately took a shit on me.
Proof? Maybe not. But I will never use a CDR in a Duo again.
Certainly not proof. That system had been sitting unused in a box for eight years. It could have partially seized up, it could have been defective from the factory. My first Duo actually was defective from the factory and had to be exchanged a month after I bought it.
I'm not primarily a CD-R user, but I have logged probably 100 hours between my Duo R and my IFU system with no lasers dying. My original US Duo (technically my second one since, as I mentioned, I had to return the first one) played probably 40-60 hours worth of CDRs before I sold it to someone here. This Duo had probably 2000 hours on it since I owned it for 15 years or so before it left my possesion and it worked perfectly when I sold it.
...and do you want to know something even crazier? When I had both a US Duo and a Duo R I noticed that the drive would skip easier in the Duo R so I SWITCHED DRIVES a year or so before I sold it. This means that the laser in my Duo R is the same one I purchased new from Electronics Boutique in late 1992. The same one I beat all those games on over and over again for 15 years before moving it to the Duo R where I then beat many more games, including stuff like Ys IV translated...on a CD-R. All the CDRs I played on the US Duo and the Duo R used the same laser!
So if you want to argue that CDRs kill lasers based on the laser doing more active minute focusing (this is the only wear and tear we are actually talking about, right?) then, fine, sure, but I can tell you that the damage certainly doesn't happen very quickly. At all.
In fact, I'm going to go play something on CDR right now just for the hell of it. I'll let you know when the laser dies.
