Two years ago (26 months actually), I bought a DVD duplicator from Telex Spinwise. Six DVDs at a time, pretty nice stuff. I was getting about a 90% success rate on burning DVDs. Yes, sometimes not everyone burned. Heck, you can't always bat a thousand!

A few months after having my duplicator... a bay died.

That sucked, but at least the thing was under warranty!

So after 16 bucks for shipping and 4 weeks without a duplicator, I had it back and it worked fine.

For a while. A few months later, another bay died.

Geeze, Louise... can't win here! 83% of the bays work and I'm still getting a 90% success rate on burning.

I can live with that. I had decided that if ANOTHER bay died (putting me down to 4), I'd bite the bullit and ship it off and get it fixed.

Well... wouldn't you know it?!

I had an order for about 200 DVDs the other day. Needed them back in about 24 hours. Heck, no problem for me! I have 5 bays... maybe nine minutes to copy... I'd be done before dinner! Icy cold Coronas to follow!

Enter Murphy.

So I went to copying... and another bay died. After a few expletives, I pressed on. Until another and then another... until I was down to ONE bay.

At this point, I was using language I won't soon repeat. Use your imagination and I can promise you that George Carlin has NOTHING on me.

Finally, the duplicator gave up the ghost. NOTHING was coming out.

Like a turtle on his back, I was screwed.

So I called the tech support folks. Luckily there's a place that's authorized to work on these suckers about an hour from where I live.

The bad news is that after I told him (the dealer) what was going on, he said the thing was toast.

It's a BOAT ANCHOR. It couldn't be salvaged.

Does anybody have any recommendations for other duplicators? I have about 600+ DVDs I'll need to be copying in the next 4-6 weeks. Time is money! HELP! Who or what would you recommend?

Oddly enough, I just got an email from these folks.

http://www.discmakers.com/shop/

Seem to have a pretty good line of gear. Check them out.

Or is this the SAME gear that just died?

wytron controller with big 9 bay case, 8 drives of your choice and bolt a hard disk in somewhere (allow 10 gig per image 'slot' on the drive if you set it up to do dual layer).

Some folks opt for 7 burners and a reader but an 8 writer box still allows one of the writers to double up as a reader anyway and Id rather image to hard disk than do '1 reader to 7 recorder copying'.

Id buy 4 spare identical drives when purchasing it to use as swap outs as and when any fail. You might not need them but these units work best with a set of identical drives right down to firmware revision and it can be a royal pita finding one or two drives to recomplete a set 6 months or 12 months later (considerig how often manufacs revise their writers). By time you work thru the 4 spares the drives are all going to be so long in the tooth that you might as well gut it and start again with a new set.

Only annoyances Ive ever had with wytron is that they moved over from supplying firmware upgrades as downloads that could be programmed into the controler using a CDR, over to a system where they wanted the controler returned for firmware upgrades (for 6 controllers that just wasnt practical). That said a firmware upgrade would only really be essential when it came to gutting out all the drives and replacing them with new ones that the controller wasnt aware of how to deal with (ie 3 year old controller being asked to support brand new models of drive)

There are other similar controllers to the wytron but we werent overly impressed by the ones we tried when putting our systems together initally, however I never made the effort to revist those alternative ones, so they may well have improved over the years.

Oh and if you go for a tower duplicator like that Id keep burn speed down to 4x - you'll still get 24 discs an hour easily out of the tower at a nice leisurely pace and you can run far longer runs before heat build up becomes an issue At 8x speed the max run time before a break reduces significantly which suggests the drives are getting more stressed.

typical lifespan we got on ours was 2 to 3 years, then we'd gut them out for a fresh set of drives before the failure rates increased beyond the occassional annoyance (probalby 30k of discs per 8 drive unit).

Oddly enough, I just got an email from these folks.

http://www.discmakers.com/shop/

Seem to have a pretty good line of gear. Check them out.

Or is this the SAME gear that just died?

I just bought an 8 disc tower for $700 with FW 400 and USB 2.0, 160 HD, DL+/-, etc... from Meritline.com (free shipping and a free thermal printer, and a two-year warranty) for a 1000 disc run I've got in a few weeks. I ran three wedding DVD copies through it this morning and it worked like a charm. I looked at the Reflex mentioned in your link when making a purchase decision, but it uses proprietary media (I don't understand how), and the one I bought uses any media. I've got inkjet printable Verbatim 8x that I used in this run.

Grant

It sounds like an overheating problem. It could be as simple as adding a muffin fan or two... that and replacing all your drives.

http://www.cddvdking.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=1019

This is the one we have and it's amazing. It even includes the shipping. Get the pioneer drives. We have a 100% rate. Out of the 1000 we have burned in the last 2 weeks, only one failed, but it was a bad disc. They're good and easy to work with too.

Hi Colby

Sorry to hear about your problems....

I have had lots of success with Primera's Bravo range of duplicators. They may only burn one or two at a time, but they are automated so you can set them off, leave them and come back to 50 or so perfectly printed discs. I've had one a couple of years and reckon on at least 99% success rate.

Hope this helps

We have had very good luck with the microboards products.

Chuck

Well folks, I ordered (and already received) a duplicator from Discmakers. I appreciate all the info!

However... I'm averaging at least a 29% failure rate on average... sometimes more.

I'm beginning to think I'm cursed or the DVDs I'm using are.

I want to shoot myself.

In the foot.

With a b-b gun...

Bite the bullet and purchase Taiyo Yuden DVDs from www.supermediastore.com. At 37 cents a disc for the premium line, I've never had a bad burn in three years. I use a 10 bay tower from the same store, two Bravo Disc Publishers and two DVD MicroOrbits from Microboards. I wouldn't wish the MicroBoards on my enemy, I had the same quality problems you experienced with the Telex equipment. By the way, Telex seems to have discontinued their DVD duplicator line.

Thanks William!
Since my last post (almost an hour ago), I used the included discs that came with the duplicator rather than continue with my left over hundred something discs I purchased a while back.

Right now I'm 15 for 15...

I need a beer.