The Butler Mastering - CD, DVD & Vinyl Music Mastering Specialists
172 b Norton Street, Leichhardt, Sydney - +61 403 435 686
DDP is the best [current and widely accepted] way to deliver your master to your replication plant for pressing. If your mastering house is not providing this option, chances are they are not doing mastering professionally.
Technically DDP, or "Disc Description Protocol" is a disc image of your final master CD, the reason it is superior to a normal red-book audio CD is that you are skipping the physical burning process and therefore skipping the errors inherent in burning an audio CD.
All CD burners, no matter how good they are will burn errors onto your precious master. Most errors are what we call "soft errors" which will be corrected by your CD player using the error correction known as CRC or "Cyclical Redundancy Check". These are definitely minimised by mastering houses using premium CD Audio specific CD drives [like the Plextor Premium drives we use] and premium media [like the Taiyo Yuden discs we use] but are not something you should start with when doing large replication runs. If you'd like to find out more, please drop us a line.
The Butler Mastering
