Characterization of optical recording disk noise

Various sources of noise on Te-alloy optical recording disks are isolated and examined. Examples of disks in which substrate, Te-alloy coating, or recording noise dominates are presented. When a Te-alloy medium is properly chosen to minimize its coating and writing noise, a disk using a typical polymethylmethacrylate substrate has a carrier-to-noise ratio in excess of 60dB with a 30KHz bandwidth. For these low noise Te-alloy based disks, the substrate noise dominates. © 1983 SPIE.