Does the speed of CD burning affect audio quality? Options

[Wakashizuma]

Does burning CDs with higher speeds lower their audio quality? Is there any scientific truth into this?
Thanks in advance

[fracai]

Does burning CDs with higher speeds lower their audio quality? Is there any scientific truth into this?
Thanks in advance

It's possible. I'm not sure how likely.

CDs are burned by a laser which turns on and off to place pits onto the disc. As you increase the burn speed, you must increase the rate at which the laser can turn on and off. At the higher end of the speed scale it's possible that instead of clean sharp pits, you might end up with gradual slopes on the edges of the pit. When a reader later scans these sloped pits the reader may have a harder time distinguishing the signal.

I have never seen any actual studies on burn speed vs read quality, so I can't say anything definite, but it might be a good idea to reduce the speed a bit. I've seen advice to never go above 4x, but for a 32x burner I can't imagine it's necessary to drop that much. For a 32x burner I might drop to 24 or even 16 if I didn't mind waiting. We're talking 700MB of data anyway. It doesn't take that long to burn

Has anyone ever seen any actual research on this?

[Wakashizuma]

Thanks
My drive is capable of 40X but I use 8X to burn CDs. I have seen people claiming 1X to be the only good solution for obtaining the best quality.

Moderation: Removed unnecessary quotation.

This post has been edited by greynol: Jun 19 2008, 18:19

[Lyx]

If i remember previous tests correctly, then very high burning speeds as well as very low burning speeds tend to negatively affect quality. So, choosing the lowest possible speed may not be a good idea.

[[JAZ]]

May i remark that talking about *audio quality* here, we're talking about the possibility of data being some more difficult for a player to read, which only means:
a) more data interpolation from the player, hiding the error.
b) actual scratchs, skips and/or highly hearable noises.

with (b) being quite less probable than (a)
and with (a) *not* being "less bass" "not bright highs".


Said that, it's been quite some time since i last burnt audio Cd's, and at that time, i was using it at 16x or so.

[Marky Mark]

Several years ago I had an experience with using 40x rated CDs, burned at the CD drive's max rate of 24x, that were unreadable. Changing the burning speed to 16x resulted in consistently readable discs (using the same CD drive). Granted, I only burned 2 or 3 discs at 24x before changing burn speed, so it's possible that:

1) The discs burned at 24x were bad discs, a product of the manufacturing (however having 2 bad CD-Rs in the same batch as the ones that worked at 16x makes me think this is not the reason).

2) It might not be the absolute burn speed that's as important as the burn speed relative to the max burning speed capable by a given drive. For example, I have a (cheap) drive capable of burning at 32x that I use to burn at 16x and have yet to run into any problems when reading data from the burned CDs on any other drive. Maybe I will try burning at the max speed of 32x just to see if it hiccups a bit and makes the disc not readable.

I guess my point is, after my past experiences I use 16x since pretty much all modern drives are capable of faster burn rates (so I don't max out the drive's speed), and this results in a reasonable burning time that is acceptable to me (~5 min for a pretty full CD-R).

Burn baby burn,
Mark

[DVDdoug]

I'm with [JAZ]... The term "audio quality" might be misleading. A bad-burn can affect "data integrity", which in-turn can affect audio quality.

I've read about this problem with DVDs. Somebody used an electron microscope to compare DVDs burned at high and low speeds. The one burned at high-speed had pits that were somewhat "blurred". Of course, this is going to depend on the particular burner and "your milage may vary".

Since I read about this, I've been burning CDs and DVDs at lower speeds (usually 4X).

When you get a "bad burn", you don't always know why... It could have been a bad-blank, of something else might have gone-wrong. It seems that things "go wrong" less-frequently if you burn at lower speeds.

If you have a bad CD or a "bad burn", it might play OK on one player, but not on another. (As most of you know, when you have trouble ripping a CD it's usually worthwhile to try a different drive.)

With data CDs and DVD's the operating system will re-try when it gets an error, and will report errors if it fails after some mumber of re-trys. But with audio CDs and video DVDs, you don't always know that you're having read-problems. The playback software/firmware has error-correction and error-hiding features, and when it hits an error that it can't fix/hide, it just skips-ahead and keeps on playing (if it can).

So, I just try to "play it safe" by using lower burn-speeds.

[comets]

What about ripping a cd?

[mhudson7]

If i remember previous tests correctly, then very high burning speeds as well as very low burning speeds tend to negatively affect quality. So, choosing the lowest possible speed may not be a good idea.

This is exactly what I found using Plextools diagnostics and burning a CD-RW at different speeds with my PX-712SA. I found that 8x was best for that particular combination, so I use 8x for everything.

This post has been edited by mhudson7: Jun 20 2008, 00:10

[kornchild2002]

What about ripping a cd?

Rip speeds should not affect data integrity or audio quality. EAC and dBpowerAMP rip audio CDs on my notebook at about 20X and sometimes even 24X (the fastest read speed for my drive is 48X but I found that it normally reads at 20X-24X). The results are always secure and/or accurate unless the CD is physically damaged, has some dust on it, or the ripper experiences some other error related to the CD itself (ie not the drive). On top of that, these secure ripping programs are smart enough to slow down ripping speed if they do come across an error.

[Zoom]

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