Desktop Quality Control for CDs & DVDs

Quality Control for CDs and DVDs was my most successful Clover Systems product line. I believe that is because most of my previous products were things that I wanted to make, whereas the Optical Disc Testing products were things that there was an actual customer demand for. That made all the difference.

The CD Analyzer can measure disc quality by looking at the number and severity of errors generated in the playback process, as well as the HF signal from the optical pickup. For more information about how this works, see "Verification Is Not Enough".

I started with the CD Analyzer I built for Laser Video as a consultant in 1986. I made a deal with Laser Video / Disc Manufacturing to produce and sell this product and give DMI a royalty, since they had paid for the development.

My original CD Analyzer consisted of a Philips CD100 CD player and an IBM PC. I tapped into the error detection flags and the HF signal from the pickup and ran them to a connector on the CD100. I also designed and built an ISA bus card that fit in the IBM PC and decoded the various signals from the player.

Philips CD100

ISA Bus card for IBM PC

This was a good example of how you can minimize the expense of development by using things that already exist.

We soon changed to a Philips CD950 player.

There were several variations of the CD Analyzer over the years: the first was a VideoDisk Analyzer, which substituted a VideoDisk player for the CD. VideoDisks were created to replace VHS video cassette players, but weren't very popular due to their high cost.

LaserDisc Analyzer

There was a clear disc analyzer that could play an un-metalized disc by substituting a more powerful laser. This enabled the manufacturer to test the discs before metallization.

Later on, I made a Glass Master Player that worked the same way but played a 12" master made from 1" thick glass!

As soon as I noticed that there was a demand for CD testing equipment, I contemplated making it into a Clover Systems product. LaserVideo by now had changed their name to Disc Manufacturing and had sold many of my CD Analyzers either directly or through third parties.

DMI DiscAnalyzer

In the 1980's and 1990's, I made quite a few products for LaserVideo / Disc Manufacturing, Inc. When the world discovered that you could put any kind of data on a CD, that spawned a flood of different formats of CDs.

I made many different formatters for special-purpose discs made for companies like IBM and Verbatim.

They included formatters for various optical disc formats, Clear Disc Player, Glass Master tester, VideoDisc Analyzer, etc. etc.

QA-101 is born...

After a while, I decided to make a new Clover Systems CD Analyzer, which I called QA-101. This was an entirely new approach, so I didn't have to pay any royalty to DMI.

It was a self-contained unit, so no PC was required. It originally used the Philips CD950, which I modified to add a window for an LCD, and a couple of buttons to control the software, plus a circuit board that could fit inside the new player.

Repurposing existing mass-produced products is a great way for a little guy to get started manufacturing a product, but the trade-off is that you're at the mercy of the original manufacturer.

So Philips soon stopped making the CD950 player, and I had to make my own. There were only two companies in the world that were able to make the pickups, but fortunately, Philips was willing to sell pickups and other critical components to others.

I was able to buy the optical pickups and ICs from Phillips, and I designed and built a PCB that decoded the error signals and could fit inside the player, along with a vacuum fluorescent display and keypad.

Eliminating the PC made it very inexpensive and opened up a whole new market for CD testing. Now anyone in the supply chain from manufacturer to end user can accurately evaluate disc quality.

I also developed PC software that could gather the data from up to 32 QA-101s via an RS485 interface and display graphs of the results (QA-Net Software).

Although the original CD players were strictly for music, people were finding that CD-ROMs were ideal for storing and distributing data. CD-ROM drives with a 5.5" floppy drive form factor took over the market. This then led to the development of the Clover Systems CDX high-speed CD analyzer.

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Here are some additional pages about optical disc testingCDX and DVX