The Outer Limit: CD-Rs with 80, 90 and 99 Minutes

Summary: 90-Minute CDs For All CD Players

Anyone who owns a reasonably modern CD burner should not miss the opportunity of trying to create 90-minute audio CDs. Because as a rule, CD-R90 media can be replayed without errors on any CD player. This discovery runs counter to the widespread belief that many older CD players show problems even with 80-minute recordings.

Furthermore our test showed that the burners from LG Electronics and Mitsumi were the best suited for overburning and were the only appliances capable of writing 99 minutes to blank CDs. The other burners from past tests, on the other hand, were only able to write a maximum of 89 minutes and 59 seconds. The hit for fans of overburning is LG Electronics GCE-8160B. This device creates oversized audio CDs with more than 90 minutes play time with a maximum burn speed of 8x! All other CD writers that we tested can only create oversized CDs at a maximum speed of 2x. A good example is the Mitsumi CR-4805 TE: we were only able to create an error-free, 83-minute music CD at 1x burning speed. As soon as the speed went up to 2x or 4x, the burn process was aborted with an error message after the 80-minute limit.

The fact that we could increase the total playing time (in a car CD changer) by up to 30 percent by using a 90-minute CD was the most convincing result of the test.

A CD-R80 recording with more than 82 minutes of music - consisting of 14 individual tracks. Unfortunately, the CD player still does not support a CD text function - otherwise it would be possible to display the titles and the names. However, they are physically still included on the CD.