I remember reading awhile ago that CD-Rs burned at slower speeds may be more compatible with older set top players. Has this ever been scientifically or empirically proven? Is so, what burning speed do people recommend?

I was also wondering if a slow burned CD-R might possibly have a longer life span of readable data. Is there any truth to this? Would you recommend the same burning speed as above? I have always just burned at the maximum speed, but maybe this isn't a good practice.

I not too sure if this is actually accurate, but sometimes when i burn CD-R's at very high speeds (16x-32x):

My car CD player skips easily on bumpy roads.
High speed burns also give me trouble on *very* old cd-players/boomboxes

I like to burn at 8x just to be sure!

Can anyone really confirm this?

btw: I've always used NERO

Hope Roberto isn't going to read this, but before selling my Philips CD100 player (yes, the legendary CD100), I tried playing some CD-Rs and CD-RWs. None of the CD-RWs worked and for CD-R, the speed didn't make a difference. What did make a difference was the VariRec level of the Plextor burns and I was able to achieve the best results with +2 on most media (tried TY, CMC, Ritek and Moser Baer India). I also didn't have any problems with LG GSA-E10L and Plextor PX-230A, no matter what speed.

Something interesting is that after burning the CD-Rs, I did a C1/C2 scan with PX-755A and noticed that the least errors were at the 24-32x burns with a pretty high level at 4x and 8x and another higher (than 24-32) level at 48x.

I professionally burn Audio/Mixed Mode CD-Rs @ 8x just with TEAC burners.

No problems.

I noticed the same when I used to only want to burn at 8x then started noticing all sorts of problems with audio CDs and data CDs, so I moved up to 16X and haven't had any problems other than when using CD-R's by Crappy Media Corporation when nothing else can be found around where I live.

From the review excerpt i posted here, you can see that 16x burn speed for CD-R results in a better quality than 48x on that tested drive, and speeds below 16x don't result in any further significant advantage.



This is very well possible. Burning at a lower speed, several parameters such as jitter might stay just below the threshold at which a CD-R would otherwise become unreadable for a certain problematic drive. At the same time, with a reduced error count from slower burn speed, the media has more "headroom" for aging-induced errors before it becomes unreadable.

I burn my audio CDs at 16x because if I burn them any faster, my car CD player and one of the boomboxes in my house either won't play them, or they will have lots of skipping and other problems. I've never had a problem at 16x though. I get the same results with several different brands/qualities of blank media, everything from Taiyo Yuden to Verbatim and TDK, so it's not a media quality issue. I also get the same problem regardless of which of my 3 CDRW/DVDRW drives I use, so I don't think it's a drive issue either.

That said, I don't really mind...after all, I rip in EAC Secure Mode with T&C, I think I can wait an extra minute to burn a CD I can be sure will be compatible.

My first burner was a Sony CR-140 or something close to that.

It was a PITA because to make cd's that would play in my car and on my brother's cd player, I had to burn at 2X and even then only on gold discs.

Blue dye discs would not work at all, except for data. I was told it was a laser power calibration issue. I tried firmware upgrades as they became available but the problem persisted until I had to get rid of it.

Even now, on some cheaper discs and a new burner, if I select 24X burn speed on media that is rated for this speed or higher, Nero will slow the burning process automatically. Verbatim discs and Fuji datalife discs burn at top speed without a problem.

Every time any CD is played, there are read errors. CD players have several stages of error correction built in, as part of the basic design specifications, so most of these errors are corrected, or inaudibly glossed over, before the data ever reaches the analogue stages.

There are readers/players that will report some of these errors to the outside world. Quite expensive equipment is used in pressing plants and other places where the necessity justifies the expense. For some years now, various CD ROM and DVD writers have also had some error reporting capabilities, limited relative to the professional equipment, but adequate to provide some useful view of disk condition.

Various programs are available to read and report these errors, such as KProbe (KProbe2), written for Lite-On, but compatible with a few other drives, CDSpeed from Nero, and some Plextor utility exclusively for certain Plextor drives. If you have such a drive, running tests on some of your new CD-Rs, holding them for a year, or several years, then re-testing, should give some idea of whether or not there is much deterioration very quickly.

I've often seen it written that, to insure best results, one has to match the particular CD-R blanks to the particular drive at the optimum speed for that combination. While there may be some truth to that, my limited experience with three writers, and perhaps a dozen different CD-R blanks, is a little different.

I've only done a little testing below 8X, but all of that produced worse results than 8X. Once upon a time, in the dawn of CD-R technology, that was apparently not true, but the dyes now in use are formulated for higher speed writing.

I find only a little difference between 8X, 16X and 24X for good quality blanks, but a major difference for lower quality blanks. 8X results in fewer errors, on average, than any higher speed for any blanks I've tested. All those I've tested produce more errors at higher write speeds above 24X.

There are many brands of CD-R but relatively few manufacturers. Reportedly, many end brands contain whatever manufacturer's blanks were available at the best price that month. Thus, especially through general retail outlets, it can be difficult to know what you are buying. On line are various sources that sell CR-Rs from various specified manufacturers, without any retail branding.

For example, Taiyo Yuden is one of the best manufacturer's , quality wise. Fuji Film sells TY -- and other(s?), under the same label. Writing a given amount of audio at 16X onto the TY blanks may test out at 800 - 1600 total C1 errors and zero C2 errors. The other manufacturer's blanks may run as bad as 30,000 C1 errors, 20,000 C2 errors, for the same audio data at 16X. However, slow down to 8X and these others produce entirely reasonable error readings, only a little worse than the TY blanks, although there is more disk to disk variance than with TY. (In the case of Fuji Film, the TY blanks are identifiable before buying. Look for ‘manufactured in Japan' on the package label.) Some other brands I've used, (not all, by any means) have also produced very high error rates for me, even at 8X.

During playback in several CD players, I can detect no differences. Even such a high error rate get readily corrected -- or the reading mechanisms in the music CD players do a better reading job (many run only at 1X) and there are actually many fewer read errors for the hardware to correct.

If I understand what I've read, the potential difficulties of the wrong write speed are that to write at a higher speed, more laser power is required. Beaming more energy onto the disk surface, more quickly, results in more sputtering of the dye, putting droplets in random places not conducive to easier reading of what is actually intended to be there. Since all dyes deteriorate over time, harder reading to begin with seems to logically indicate more probability of become unreadable sooner.

As far as writing too slow, I don't know the mechanism, only that the published reports I've read of tests made on professional equipment are consistent that writing below 8X is worse. 8x is the best write speed in any such reports I've seen.

There are a number of different basic dye types and apparently many variations of those several types from manufacturer to manufacturer. Under artificial ageing conditions, some dye type hold up much better than other types. To the extent this is true in actual practice, initial error rates might be a poor predicator of longevity.

I had half-formed a theory at one point, that has not been tested exhaustively.

My thought was to the effect that my old CD player had a hard time with high-speed burns, which stopped when I dropped the speed to 16x. It so happened, this was near the threshhold between ZCLV and CAV writing methods for my burner. My thought was to test the player with pairs of discs from several burners - an above ZCLV threshhold disc and a below-ZCLV disc. It seemed like it could be the case, that the player didn't like zoned discs.

Then someone smashed the window of my car and stole the faceplate (of all things!) of the player and a pair of pants. No test performed.

I was just about to mention that this could be the main reason for 16x being better than faster speeds. Especially the Z-CLV (Zone Constant Linear Velocity) method, where the speed suddenly increases in between, seems prone to bad quality results.

Thanks for all the advice. It sort of looks like burning between 8x - 16x speed may be the sweet spot. I do have a Plextor burner with Plex Tools, so I should be able to do that VariRec burning if I wanted. Do other people routinely use this to help improve compatability? Are there any down sides to using VariRec?

I did it for a short while, and went back to Burrrn. VariRec discs supposedly may not be playable in everything which is why I've labeled the dozen or so I've made accordingly so if they don't work I'll know why - but so far everything I've plucked them into has played them fine.

One problem I did notice though is my old DVD player won't allow for seeking on a VariRec disc I burned, it will get stuck then give up and stop playing the disc if I use seek, it also doesn't like me to jump around selecting other tracks with that disc so jumping from say track 2 to 7 can cause it to also stop playing the disc. Other than that the whole disc plays just fine, so long as play is the only button I press on the remote.