Spotting a fake sat nav disc

Wendal

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Ok so I've read Comand's page on fake discs being blue and real ones being silver...

Is it really this straight forward though?

I challenged 'merc_digital' from flea-bay to send me a real disc after they sent me an obvious fake. My challenge 'may' have sounded more like an ultimatum but hey..

So today I receive another fake case 'but' a silver disc- with barcode on the spindle and a quality printed face.

Can this still be a fake? If its genuine why didn't it come in a genuine case? At £60 how can they afford to send me their latest genuine version?

I guess if they sell fakes costing a few quid at £60 a pop and only a small proportion complain then I guess they can afford to send a few genuine copies to keep people quiet. This is my suspicion.

So people... if this IS genuine, my advice is to buy one form 'merc_digital', complain that its a fake and wait for the genuine copy to arrive... bargain..

Id still like to know if it could be fake so any advice would be greatly received.

I've no idea what to do with this fake. I have a friend who's an idiot, i may try it in his machine ;-)
 
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Wendal

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Here they are... One blue, one silver...
 

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barry jones

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I would suspect that they are both fakes to be honest....
 

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I recently had mine updated at Mercedes and the DVD was silver.

Are MB into contraband now ?
 
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Wendal

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Upon further inspection the info on the spindle of the silver disc says w169 amongst other things, so I think it's genuine. I'm going to take it to Mercedes to check..
 

hotrodder

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Ok so I've read Comand's page on fake discs being blue and real ones being silver...

Is it really this straight forward though?

Pretty much... 'genuine' CDs and DVDs are produced/replicated by pressing them, 'dvd glass master' is the term to google for the full story. The data is kinda punched into the disc making a physical track of sorts. A pressed fake (if they even exist) could be indistinguishable from genuine i'd have thought?

Recordable CDs and DVDs have a coloured dye into which the data is burnt, basically during burning the dye (various colours exist for CD, DVD is always blues or blueish purple AFAIK) is modified to create a facsimile of the origional. They aren't as reflective as pressed discs and the stability of the dye also messes with things in that cheap media is very unreliable, especially rewritable stuff. Archival quality media is much better but when it comes to things like map discs the way the thing is burnt can also make a huuuuuge difference due to the amount of 'jumping around' the laser has to do when reading them...

The sat nav in mine is CD based which helps as CDr are more reliable than DVDr but it still took me a hell of a lot of messing about to burn a reliable copy that didn't result in longer read times and/or higher temps*... burn speed seems to make a big difference, slower the better i found but that's at odds with knocking out fakes commercially (over an hour to burn one CD at 1x speed) and is compounded by needing to use top quality media which also costs more


* sometimes the player will display temps if you can access service menus, my Becker Indianapolis does and cheap CDr = higher temps and a lot of drive noise as it keeps re-reading sectors due to errors. This the reason why it's often said that burnt discs can wear out players/lasers more quickly... the thing has to 'work harder' to read 'em
 
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Wendal

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Thanks for that, a nice in depth and comprehensive answer, so in short its either a genuine or an 'as good as' punch copy...
 

Alfie

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Here they are... One blue, one silver...

The second image a fake disk. At first glance the first one looks genuine.

If you complain enough they will probably send you a genuine one just to stop you going to trading standards or grassing them up to Mercedes.
 
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Alfie

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Pretty much... 'genuine' CDs and DVDs are produced/replicated by pressing them, 'dvd glass master' is the term to google for the full story. The data is kinda punched into the disc making a physical track of sorts. A pressed fake (if they even exist) could be indistinguishable from genuine i'd have thought?

Recordable CDs and DVDs have a coloured dye into which the data is burnt, basically during burning the dye (various colours exist for CD, DVD is always blues or blueish purple AFAIK) is modified to create a facsimile of the origional. They aren't as reflective as pressed discs and the stability of the dye also messes with things in that cheap media is very unreliable, especially rewritable stuff. Archival quality media is much better but when it comes to things like map discs the way the thing is burnt can also make a huuuuuge difference due to the amount of 'jumping around' the laser has to do when reading them...

The sat nav in mine is CD based which helps as CDr are more reliable than DVDr but it still took me a hell of a lot of messing about to burn a reliable copy that didn't result in longer read times and/or higher temps*... burn speed seems to make a big difference, slower the better i found but that's at odds with knocking out fakes commercially (over an hour to burn one CD at 1x speed) and is compounded by needing to use top quality media which also costs more


* sometimes the player will display temps if you can access service menus, my Becker Indianapolis does and cheap CDr = higher temps and a lot of drive noise as it keeps re-reading sectors due to errors. This the reason why it's often said that burnt discs can wear out players/lasers more quickly... the thing has to 'work harder' to read 'em

Excellent post.
 

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The second image a fake disk. At first glance the first one looks genuine.

If you complain enough they will probably send you a genuine one just to stop you going to trading standards or grassing them up to Mercedes.


Ha Ha Alfie! I think that ship has sailed and Mercedes having read this are probably already on the case.
 

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Pretty much... 'genuine' CDs and DVDs are produced/replicated by pressing them, 'dvd glass master' is the term to google for the full story. The data is kinda punched into the disc making a physical track of sorts. A pressed fake (if they even exist) could be indistinguishable from genuine i'd have thought?

Recordable CDs and DVDs have a coloured dye into which the data is burnt, basically during burning the dye (various colours exist for CD, DVD is always blues or blueish purple AFAIK) is modified to create a facsimile of the origional. They aren't as reflective as pressed discs and the stability of the dye also messes with things in that cheap media is very unreliable, especially rewritable stuff. Archival quality media is much better but when it comes to things like map discs the way the thing is burnt can also make a huuuuuge difference due to the amount of 'jumping around' the laser has to do when reading them...

The sat nav in mine is CD based which helps as CDr are more reliable than DVDr but it still took me a hell of a lot of messing about to burn a reliable copy that didn't result in longer read times and/or higher temps*... burn speed seems to make a big difference, slower the better i found but that's at odds with knocking out fakes commercially (over an hour to burn one CD at 1x speed) and is compounded by needing to use top quality media which also costs more


* sometimes the player will display temps if you can access service menus, my Becker Indianapolis does and cheap CDr = higher temps and a lot of drive noise as it keeps re-reading sectors due to errors. This the reason why it's often said that burnt discs can wear out players/lasers more quickly... the thing has to 'work harder' to read 'em

This is OK up to a point, but the pickup head on every CD or DVD has a fixed output gain, this is set during manufacture to the distance from the TT. This beam is then focused to that point, and the off set adjusted so that the kick works in both directions without overshoot.

When playing back any disc there is no facility to change the pickup head gain other than the difference between a CD and DVD. In the case of a DVD the gain is optimized at the initial read in and read out only.

The pickup head will either read the disc or it will not, there is no such thing as working harder, as it cannot, but depending on the design, some pickup heads and mechanism's are better than others.

Most of us may have heard the effects of a sound CD disc that is damaged, when it starts to skip miss read, and the disc speeds up or slows at random, depending upon where the head has moved to, this is where the offset may not be good in the unit concerned. Some CD players have built in blanking, so that if it miss reads it blanks and moves on when the disc only has minor damage or a poor copy. The information pressed or burnt into disc are known as pits and troughs, and the pickup head is just reading digital bits.

In the case of a poor head or one incorrectly set, or a poor or damaged disc it may freeze and get no further. There is nothing in the units that can help, with a sound only disc if the head gets to a bad track or damage it may move on or just stick where it is, in the case of a sound unit one removes the disc or moves it on to a part of the disc that can be read as the noise is horrible, in the case of a DVD who watches a frozen picture ??.

It is wrong to say that anything is wearing or getting hotter or that the head is jumping around, the head is sent to where it needs to be or ordered to be, it is only reading a load of 0's and 1's. In the third picture you will see the set up chart for the head, and nothing there to change the head gain.

The flow chart from a CD and DVD are not the same and shown in the pics below.

Going back to about 1990 I was given the first recordable CD player in the world made by Marrantz (Phillips) to try to turn into a jingle machine and have 200 jingles on 1 disc. The most important things was the speed and accuracy of hitting the right track in under 1 second. The second one to hit the market was MicroMega using a Philips deck this worked well, but the third machine the Studer (the German professional side of Revox) was horrible, it miss tracked and was very poor, the joke was it cost more than double the other 2 at £2500.

Nothing here to alter the head gain.
Mail0007_zps6530a70d.jpg


CD flow chart

Mail0009_zps61b5a114.jpg
 

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1. I never said anything about gain or laser power i said...
sometimes the player will display temps if you can access service menus, my Becker Indianapolis does and cheap CDr = higher temps and a lot of drive noise as it keeps re-reading sectors due to errors. This the reason why it's often said that burnt discs can wear out players/lasers more quickly... the thing has to 'work harder' to read 'em
and put work harder in quotes as i was generalising about the drive having to work harder to read badly burnt/cheapnese recordable media. I don't really appreciate being called a liar either, as i said i've played about burning my own back up map discs for my Becker Indianapolis and monitored drive temps and error rates in the service menus while testing burnt discs... both the media itself and the speed at which it was burnt had a big effect on the speed at which the head unit read the disc when calculating routes. Bad copies = slower read times along with FAR more drive noise as the drive took multiple attempts to read the thing which resulted in the service menu reporting more read errors and higher drive temps. Keep trying to use such a map disc and the drive eventually starts making all sorts of noise as it struggles to read the disc before eventually giving up and rejecting it

2. Since you brought up gain i suggest you google terms like cd dvd drive automatic gain control as the first recordable CD player that was made 24 years ago in 1990 isn't that relevant today or even with players made 10 years ago...

Phillips from 2003... http://www.nxp.com/documents/data_sheet/TZA1038HW.pdf says
7.2.5 A
UTOMATIC DUAL LASER SUPPLY
The TZA1038HW can control the output power of two lasers; it has an Automatic Laser Power Control (ALPC) that stabilizes the laser output power and compensates the effects of temperature and ageing of the laser
http://rolsen.ru/content/tech/RDV-750.pdf which is a service manual and says
2. DVD Servo AFE IC : ES6603
The ES6603 is a high-performance, single-chip analog front-end (AFE) device that contains the servo functions, RF attenuator, automatic gain controller (AGC), and programmable equalizer/filter for a DVD player system, and dual auto laser power control circuit to support twin pickups or twin laser systems.The ES6603 incorporates a bi-directional serial port for accessing the programmable functions of the internal AGC, including attenuation and boost/equalization.The DVD servo block of the ES6603 includes mirror detection, defect detection, dual auto laser power control, focus error, center error, and tracking error detection circuits. The ES6603 provides AC-coupled voltage inputs for photo detector signals used to detect center error, focusing error, tracking error, and differential phase tracking error detection for DVD
http://www.for-mrfixit.com/upgrade/CD-DVD_drives.html Dunno how authoritative this link is but it claims that...
The optical pick-up relies on the reflective properties of the disc. The reflective property of a manufactured disc is around 70%. Recodable and ReWritable discs use a dye that only has a reflective property of 20%. This created a problem reading dics in standard drives. To solve the problem with low-reflective dyes, additional circuitry called an Automatic Gain Control (AGC) was incorporated in new drive designs
3. I know that CD and DVD are not the same, that's part of the reason i pointed out that CDr are typically more reliable than DVDr which brings us to the discs themselves...
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001477/147782E.pdf and http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/894.05/docs/StabilityStudy.pdf which are two studies about the reliability of recordable CD and DVD media for national archive purposes and include stuff about the difference in wavelengths between CD and DVD which in turn kinda explains explain why DVDr is typically more fussy/less reliable than CDr
They also discuss the effect that temperature and humidity have on the life on recordable media, not so relevant for a movie burned to watch in the front room but in a car that's subject to huuuuuge variations in both temp and humidity...

4. While the media is the same map data is VERY different to music or a movie in the way it's read... as you say an unreadable sector on a music CD or a movie and it'll have a couple of goes and then typically either skip forward or reject the disc. Can't skip sections when it's trying to get data to calculate a route and even when the there are no unreadable sectors the optical pick up has to do far more jumping around than it does when playing an album, kinda akin to skipping randomly forwards and backwards through an album except that it has to do this due to the way data is stored on the disc
 

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I will not go into all the quotes that you have put up as they do not apply to the average cheap drive fitted to the comand units, the average Comand has a drive that can be bought for £20. I will also suggest that your temp reading when testing was no more than the unit had been on longer. Why would anyone be looking for a temp change when the phenomenon does not exist, you have failed to tell me how a pick up head can work harder when there is nothing there that can do this. As for detecting a heat change in a comand unit how is that possible, its in a steel box with little venting as they do not get that hot in normal running, and a plastic cover/ front, it is screwed to the dash of the car, and this all acts as a heat sink. Nothing has changed in principle since I had my training, sure things move on but the little laser head has not changed much. Once again if you think the head is getting hot, how much heat can a plastic laser measuring no more than 20mm x 20mm x 10mm give out.

I was still active to 2010, there are no automatic gain drives fitted to the comand, I have repaired quite a few for dealers.Never in my life have I had a unit getting too hot through any disc reading error.

I am still puzzled by when you say the unit gets hot when miss tracking starts as the head flips around. This is not the case at all as the head flips around when a new part of the map is required or in the case of a sound unit, when people jump from track to track, no one sits there listening to a disc miss tracking. There is still no heat involved here, the head servo is active in miss tracking as is the motor drive, and these are only the cheapest motors made, nothing here to generate heat. In the case of miss tracking its there for a few seconds only as the operation is turned off. The average deck in a computer will see the life of the computer out.

Some things are fixed. The average CD or DVD have similar decks. The fixed part is the start up. In the first place the pick up gain is preset, to high and the head life is shortened, too low and it will be too fussy on what it can read like on the comand 2 and 2.5. the laser gain was set low to stop the head from being heard, and just possible to read a good disc.

So you turn on and insert the disc, on selecting play the head is turned on, it rises to see if the disc is there. It rises again to set the focus, do remember that the laser gain cannot be changed and the focus has the be set to allow for different disc thicknesses, and the focus is set to read the disc that is in at the time, there is no further adjustment that can take place. the head rises to read the TOC and ordered to select track 1. If auto play it will start, in the case of a comand disc, the selected route will send the head to the correct part of the disc. You just cannot have an auto head gain while in play, and no point in having it. Sure you can have it so that is self sets on the insertion of a disc.

The head is picking up a reflected signal just reading digital bits, if it cannot read, then routing will not work, in the same way as no no listens to a sound track skipping. The head cannot try harder, there is nothing there to promote this. Sure just like a sound CD it will keep trying. depending on the software design it may just keep trying or eject the disc. This part is programmable providing if is there in the first place. most comands will stop reading.

Now we have a commercial disc verses a home copy, once again it can either read it or it cannot, there is nothing the to make it try harder, it just cannot, the gain is fixed. . The only difference here is that some DVD's or CDR's will boost the gain at the initial read and in the pic below, but once up and running this cannot be changed. Digital bits have no amplitude as such, so nothing to create heat, so once playing it makes no difference as to what disc it is playing. Reading the TOC has no meaning into whether the unit can actually play the disc. Depending on the design or the way it was set up it might track fine in the outer tracks and skip in the inner tracks, or the other way round. As for the rest of it there is just the DAC, and that is not bothered by any disc.

In your quote on the disc it talks about the dangers of the disc and that information can get lost, home made disc are more liable to loose info as said.

In my workshop I have a laser gain meter, a TT height gauge, plus the manufactures disc to set them up. The price of the deck played no part in how well it could track, we had a joke in Sweden in that a cheap £100 deck would out perform a £2500 Studer by a large margin.. Test disc have built in faults going to a scale of up to 20, the average deck would have to get to track 10 before it was considered OK, the average Studer might make track 10 but the Sony would always get to track 18 to 20.
In this field things have got better with computer controlled set up menu's, but these are only accessible if you had the service manual.

On behalf of Yamaha UK I gave 4 lectures in the UK on how they work. I gave 1 lecture in Belgium on behalf of Harmon UK and 6 in Sweden for Swedish radio. I am just an simple engineer that has repaired some 4000 units, fitting more than 2500 pick up heads.
 

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I don't go into the science of this but I have personally seen and felt many many comand units that are extremely hot when using a copied disk. Now, whether this is due to the disk spinning up and down many times (I can hear it doing so) or some other reason I'm not sure. But what I am certain of is these things get very hot. Put in a genuine disk and they immediately run cooler and dont display the 'Please insert Navigation DVD' message when the disk is in! Whether this is all because the DVD drives in Comand units are cheap and not as robust as those fitted to PC's I don't know. Technology in this area moves on at quite a pace and certainly the newer units are a lot more tolerant to copied music disks, not so copied firmware/map disks though.

I have also seen a number of customers who have trashed their comand units by trying to perform map updates with copied disks.

I'm not lieing or making this up. It is genuine first hand experience. I have emails from customers supporting this and have posted some on my website. But hey what do I know? I only do this for a living.
 

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lets get back to the original claims of heat.

When the first generation of CD players came along, the problem of heat did not exist, as the deck was mounted one side in a case 17" long with the electronic mounted in the other side. As time progressed the mini and micro systems evolved. Now we have the whole thing in a box measuring 140 x 128 x 23mm
with the mini systems we have the deck mounted at the top, these units had a very short life as heat is a killer in everything electronic. The heat would rise, killing many components on the way.

As with all things people demand smaller things, and things are different now.

First we have the cost to take into account as the price of buying 5000 could be 10 x higher than buying 500.000. Most CD/DVD drives are used in computers, and again they are all getting smaller, special drives are now made for laptops that are only a few mm deep, with all these there are heat problems, to overcome this or shall we say help, the PCB are no longer just 1 flat board, they now are made up of vertical sections, as the heat can run off better, but the heat still rises through the head and disc. Further developments include the use of inverters as more can be done with higher voltages.
To prevent the performance from deteriorating within the LSI (it generates a large amount of heat in its self ) from the heat, new methods are now used with with special heat sinks that can dissipate the heat better, and stop the disc from getting too hot, further measures have been taken in the newer units to stop the heat from the navigation board rising to the LSI circuits by inserting a 2mm thick aluminum plate between the two.

Back to home made verses commercial disc.

We know the current consumption is between 50 and 100 watts or more in extreme cases, plus 13 watts more for DVD.

Now we know (or I do) that the head cannot change to play an unreadable or poor recording as the variation in power consumed only changes with the content of the disc, there is no such thing in difficulty in reading the disc or taking too long, for if that was the case it is already skipping or freezing as the disc is still going round.

The only thing that can change the power consumption (heat) is the content of the disc. A 1k sine wave has far less information on the disc than Beethoven's 5th symphony (information per cm of disc track) So this brings us to the question again copy or genuine.

I completely fail to see how any copied disc can have more information than a genuine one, it is after all the more information the higher the power and the hotter it all becomes.

The only real way that this could be checked is with a chart plotter joined into the power supply (I do have one but no ink or paper left) and compare the chart after playing the original and the genuine.

One could insert an analogue ammeter into the supply and watch the peak and general quiescent current.

As for me, I just repair and solve problems, I have been the sole service agent for Yamaha, Nakamichi, Teac,Tascam, Harmon Kardon, JBL,Micromega, Musical Fidelity and Studer in the UK and Sweden, and still learning :D
 
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I will also suggest that your temp reading when testing was no more than the unit had been on longer.
Yes and no. It went like this... decide to burn a nav disc, take said disc out to the car to see if it works. Head unit recognises it but when i input an address it all starts to go south as each times it spins up the disc up to get data it takes far longer than it usually does, like Alfie said can hear the disc being spun up repeatedly before it eventually manages to either read it or it rejects it. At this point i enter the service menu to see what (if any) errors have been logged and decide to make a note of the drive temp. Put the origional back in which is read and accessed in a fraction of the time and out of curiousity check the service menu to see that the temp is now lower than it was with the burnt disc despite the fact that the headunit has now been on for longer due to the faffing about with my first attempt at a burnt map disc

You just cannot have an auto head gain while in play, and no point in having it. Sure you can have it so that is self sets on the insertion of a disc.
So now you're claiming that auto gain does exist after rubishing it? I never said that auto gain happens during playback :rolleyes: i said that automatic gain exists, has existed for eons and backed that up with a couple of sources which you then dismissed as not being relevant to cheap drives fitted to command. I never mentioned command once until now, i was just generalising about the differences between pressed and burnt discs, their reflectivity, error rates, readability, longevity etc. How is that so hard to comprehend?

If you'd bothered to look into the two references i posted sources to you'd have discovered that the Philips chip in the first one was being used in car stereos around 10 years ago along with a couple of their other laser control ICs that also included automatic gain control and automatic laser power control (ALPC) circuits. The Rolsen is, or at least used to be as it's an old model, a cheap Russian consumer DVD player

I'm not suprised that the drives fitted to command are cheap. The drives fitted to many (most?) high end/boutique/audiophile players are common cheap tat dressed up in a posh box. For example the CD player in my home system had a RRP of around a grand when new and was very highly rated by most*. The transport Musical Fidelity used is a Philips vam1202 which can be bought complete for under £15 new. FWIW the internet suggests that the transport in my Becker 7950 is a Philips CDM M6 4.7/84 although the 7950 isn't specifically in this list of transports http://www.n-tronics.com/english/electronic_parts/laserunits_car_systems.php it does give a clue as to how many brand names have Philips components/transports in them
Now we know (or I do) that the head cannot change to play an unreadable or poor recording as the variation in power consumed only changes with the content of the disc, there is no such thing in difficulty in reading the disc or taking too long, for if that was the case it is already skipping or freezing as the disc is still going round.

The only thing that can change the power consumption (heat) is the content of the disc. A 1k sine wave has far less information on the disc than Beethoven's 5th symphony (information per cm of disc track) So this brings us to the question again copy or genuine.

I completely fail to see how any copied disc can have more information than a genuine one, it is after all the more information the higher the power and the hotter it all becomes.
Obviously a burnt disc cannot have more infomation than the origional one, might have more errors though as anyone that's ripped albums using Exact Audio Copy will have found aren't uncommon even on pressed discs that are a few years old and/or have a few marks on 'em. Ripping/copying/playing music is a world away from a map data disc though... if the processor rejected the disc the moment it came across a read error the stealerships would be full of people complaining that their satnavs are junk. It can't skip to the next track as it's trying to get data (which isn't organised like a music album or movie) to calculate a route so as i and many others have discovered the thing keeps retrying to read the disc before giving up. My Sony DVD player does a similar thing- a scratched disc or a DVD-RW that's a few years old often results in VERY audible drive noise as it skips about trying to re read the sector and/or jumps around trying to find the next readable portion and if you don't give up it will do that for a good few minutes before rejecting the disc

One last time. I never stated that burnt discs DO wear out players faster nor did i state that the laser WAS the source of higher temps. I said...
my Becker Indianapolis does and cheap CDr = higher temps and a lot of drive noise as it keeps re-reading sectors due to errors. This the reason why it's often said that burnt discs can wear out players/lasers more quickly... the thing has to 'work harder' to read 'em
which is based on observations when testing nav discs burnt on my laptop using the only data that was available- a watch for read times and the service menu for error logs and drive temps. After a few attempts i borrowed a stand alone CD drive that gave me more control over the burn speed and by burning a copy at 1x speed (laptop won't do this) using archive quality Verbatim or Taiyo Yuden media ended up with something which the headunit can read as quickly as the origional

I don't know why you're so fixated with the phrase 'work harder'. I know it's not particularly accurate hence the inverted commas i used but it's apt... take cutting a piece of wood to length for example, if you cut it squarely and accurately the first time you haven't done much work. Cut it wonky and/or too short and you have to start over. You've done more work but have nothing (useful at least) extra to show for the extra energy expended. Akin to a headunit trying several times to read the disc before giving up and rejecting it/paying a chippy that can read a tape measure and cut straight

I'm done. This is like trying to have a debate with a politician. A waste of my time unless you want to provide independant sources to back up your claims instead of banging on about experience, telling me your CV and arguing points i never made. When you or someone else posts utter nonsense about welding or metallurgy i don't bleat on about my qualifications as it's meaningless on what's essentially an anonymous forum. I post facts backed up with links to credible sources or suggest the terms to google for more detailed infomation as with the 'glass master' comment regarding the difference between genuine/pressed and fake/burnt media

* obviously NAIM lovers hated it as they think Musical Fidelity stuff is boring because they like brash
 

television

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Fixated with the "work harder":D these are words that have been used on this thread, not used by me.

Please do not miss quote, I never said that auto focus did not exist, I said it does not take place once the head has got as far as the TOC.

I will still say that the only way to verify all the claims made is to set up a unit, with a chart plotter in the deck power supply, and run a plot with an original disc and a copied one.

We all know that power to generate heat is a bi product of Watts, and Watts is tied in with current flowing.

Also in this whole silly thread, a home made recording that is so poor, in that it skips is not a useable disc.

I consider my extensive hands on experience very useful on this subject, the only part that I am not conversant with is navigation processors.

With the start of the APS comands, I would say they all use fujitsu decks.

Sadly as many members will know, I am not allowed to say what I really would like to.

There is much more to this whole subject, that is with the whole concept of the CD as a means of storing data, it can lose information and become unusable/ unreadable through no known reason. I have one here that has the most important events taken place in my life, it worked on anything for a few years and now impossible to open, so all lost.

PS, I am sorry that I worked for many years in this subject, some one had to.:D
 

moj91

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Slightly off topic (that you guys have moved into) I also bought a DVD from merc_digital on ebay, and yes it was definitely a copy. It worked fine for about 2 months then we began to get issues in our W220. I challenged them and they refunded us, despite being adamant that it was genuine and their suppliers 'must be trying to pull a fast one'. I then bought a genuine one from COMAND online, and all is now fine.

Back to what you were saying chaps..!
 

television

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Slightly off topic (that you guys have moved into) I also bought a DVD from merc_digital on ebay, and yes it was definitely a copy. It worked fine for about 2 months then we began to get issues in our W220. I challenged them and they refunded us, despite being adamant that it was genuine and their suppliers 'must be trying to pull a fast one'. I then bought a genuine one from COMAND online, and all is now fine.

Back to what you were saying chaps..!

This is what I said at the end of my last post, disc can change, more so with a home burnt one than a factory pressing.

I know quite a few members that have made their own copies and keep the original one for back up, in a 2005 220 it is just a playback disc, recorded carefully on a good disc, you can get good results. There are far too many disc on Ebay to be genuine, one a few years old would be a safer bet.:D
 

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Have always had great success with Rusty's products with previous BMW/Audi and current Mercedes.
 

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