Burn Speeds

[Dan Gould]

OK, I understand aversion to "higher" burn speeds, but as technology races ahead, have you noticed how the possible speeds keep heading up?

So my question is, aside from a generalized fear of audio errors or disc failures, is there any compelling (i.e., actual, demonstrable failure rate) reason to keep burning audio CDs at, say, no higher than 12x, when 48x would make my burning time oh so much shorter?

[Claude]

Some CD players have problems reading CD-Rs burned at higher speeds.

I burn music CDs at 4x speed, although my CD-R writer supports 12x speed.

My DVD player (Philips DVD963SA), which can play MP3s from data CD-Rs, has problems when such CDs are written at 8x speed and higher speeds. Skipping noises which I first thought were due to MP3 encoding problems were in fact caused by the writing speed.

One should not go below 2x speed, because most current CD-R brands have higher failure rates at very low speeds.

Edited August 10, 2004 by Claude

[Dan Gould]

Thanks, Claude.

Is it safe to assume though that at the worst case, if I borrowed an LP and burned at high speed, and it turned out my CD player had troubles, I could take that burn and re-burn at a lower speed? I mean, if the errors aren't on the disc but in the playback of the disc by certain machines, I assume I can always reburn from the master copy at a lower speed.

[Stefan Wood]

I have had no problems burning at 24x, 48x, and 52x speeds, and playing them on different machines. The difference usually is in buying a cheap burner vs. one with a good reputation. I use Pioneer Superdrives made for the Mac.

[Shrdlu]

I always burn at 4X, which is plenty fast enough for me, using Nero and an internal LG burner. It produces consistently perfect results.

My son got a brand new computer that burns at 48X, or something like that. The total real time consumed in making an 80 min CDr is not much less than with the 4X burn. I only tried it once, and the resulting CDr had errors in it: the starts and ends of the (music) tracks were messed up.

So, ...

[rockefeller center]

My son got a brand new computer that burns at 48X, or something like that. The total real time consumed in making an 80 min CDr is not much less than with the 4X burn.

What is "not much less" in your estimation? I just finished burning a 79 min audio CD (burned at 40x); total time (extracting audio CD to hard drive + burning): 5min 30sec.

I only tried it once, and the resulting CDr had errors in it: the starts and ends of the (music) tracks were messed up.

So, ...

So?

[Shrdlu]

Re the "not much less" time:

it takes time to open and set Nero, copy the original onto the hard drive, then extract the original CD, put in the CDr, tell Nero to start burning, etc. etc. And, often, I have to edit the tracks to do such things as removing minor errors or unwanted, long blank spaces, before burning. So, by the time all that is done, the burn time that is saved (about 10 minutes or so) is not a very significant factor. If I were making several burns of one original, then a faster burn time might be worth considering.

The other point is that I expected there to be errors at the high speed, and I lost a blank when I made an experimental burn, so, having no real need for the high speed, I decided to stay with the tried and true.

As the locomotive driver on "Back To The Future III" said to Marty and Doc, "Why in tarnation would anyone want to go at 90 mph?"

[michel devos]

Normally, manufacturers mention in their CD-R specification sheet the burning speed that produces the least errors.For the best brands, 8x is generally recommended.

[wolff]

if I borrowed an LP and burned at high speed,

Obviously, you can only burn an LP in real time.

[Dr. Rat]

I burn a fair deal of stuff for the station where cues have to be right, and I've found when I burn higher than 12x I have an appreciably higher rate of track cue drift (eg beginning of track cue .3 seconds into the track, which usually isn't so noticeable at the beginning, but each track has a little .3 second yelp at the end.

--eric

[Dan Gould]

if I borrowed an LP and burned at high speed,

Obviously, you can only burn an LP in real time.

I'm talking about a PC burner, not a standalone, so all my LP burns are first recorded as wav files, then burned, or if they're being duplicated, extracted as a wav and then burned from the hard drive.

[Shrdlu]

If Kerry gets in, he will ban all semi-automatic burning over 4X.