[supercat]

While I'm hardly an expert on everything, I do understand something of the mechanics of how CD-audio, CD+G, and CD-data work and what some of the reliability limitations are. I do think the point needs to be made that a drive's ability to report that it wrote a disk successfully--even if the drive can read the disk back--does not imply that the disk will be readable by the half-worn-out karaoke machine used by the local KJ.

I think that MTU would do well to make this point very clear, especially if they describe somewhat how they do their testing (e.g. if they burn five full disks with each candidate drive, then play them back on the most beat-up karaoke machine they can find--one which has trouble even reading commercially-pressed disks, and reject any burner which causes any noticeable glitches on any of the 75-minute disks, they should say so. Of course, I suspect their testing is a little less rigorous than that, but it might be good for them to say what their test protocol is).

I just priced a Plextor 40x12x40 drive at $150 at Best Buy; if MTU is supplying the same drive, spending another $10+shipping for the assurance that it will handle CD+G may be worthwhile. It would be good to know exactly what testing that $10 is buying, though.