Does CD Burning Speed Matter?

Hey,

I'm using Pyro to burn some audio CD's. It says I can burn at 40x speed. Is there any advantage to using a slower speed? Any better quality?

Thanks.

Larry- the reason your error rates weren't huge is that you're using a plextor ;)

Still,- there are some mastering houses who would return that disc saying the error rate is too high.

I use the Vari-Rec mode on critical stuff and indeed pre-masters but for banging out for demo-listening 16x.

But yeah it really does also dependo on the burner and the media.

If you use a plextor with good media you can get away with 16x - possibly faster, I've not tried it as time is money also ;)

Kind regards

Dave Rich.

CDR / DVDR mediums are optimized to be burned at the speed they are rated.

It would be simple if all media manufactures created the exact same medium,
but of course that's impossible, so we have medium to burner computability issues.

Some disks burn better in one drive vs. another.
Personally I like to burn one step bellow the rated speed for audio.
You don't want to go too low becuase a 40X medium is expecting a faster laser hit
than a 4X medium, and you may end up creating errors.
(once again that depends on the media and burner)

If you are sending your material off to get mastered and manufactured,
I would highly recommend sending it as .wav on data DVDRs.

Data disks have error correction on them that audio disks do not.
(hence why you can fit more audio than data on a disk, because the data takes some extra room for this error correction)

If you want 100% guaranteed bit for bit transfer of your material proceed as follows.

1) use winrar on your "Wav" files and enable "put authenticity record"

2) burn the rar'ed up "Wavs" to DVD and send them to your people

3) forget about messing w/ different burn speeds, jitter, wow, flutter, different medium and burner compatibility.

4) go to sleep knowing that if those rar's open fine, your data is 100% in tact on the other end

The only reason I would burn audio CDs is to A/B the mix on different systems,
in which case, the odd error shouldn't affect you too much.

Peace,
Tomek.

Zep - You're confusing "successful burn" with burn error rate. We've all made beer coasters.

I'm pretty sure that all CDR's have some errors - it's a factor of the drive, software and media. Plextor includes some software with their drives that lets you actually burn discs at various speeds and then measure the error rate.

Here's what Plextor has to say about this:

Every CD has two layers of error correction called C1 and C2

C1 is error correction for the block error rate (BLER) which consists of bit errors at the lowest level. BLER is normally given in errors per second. The typical maximum BLER for quality recording is 220 errors per second.

C2 error correction applies to bytes in a frame (24 bytes per frame, 98 frames per block) and is an indication of the drive's attempt to use extended error correction to recover the data. Even a few C2 errors can be an indiaction of poor media quality or a drive's inability to write or read correctly.

CU error correction applies to uncorrectable errors or errors that are present after C2 level correction. No CU errors are allowed in a recorded disc.

An easy way to test that would be to burn an audio file at 2x
burn the same file on another disc at max speed
rip both copies back to WAV and do a bit for bit compare.

I'd lay odds with recent burning equipment and good media the 2 rips will be identical.

Zep--

You might want to check this.
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/nov04/articles/qa1104-3.htm

In my experience it was quite difficult to burn a
perfect BIT for BIT data CD, let alone an Audio CD!

I haven't done checksum tests in over 8 or so years,
so I'm sure quality has improved some. (at least I hope so)

I'd be curious if you did your own tests burning a few audio CDs.

Rip those CDs back to your HD and compare the checksums of the image files.
If you're successful the sums will be identical.

Try ripping those CDs over other drives and run checksums on those too.

Maybe I'll try it myself.

I have three PCs here with different drives,
have to get some blank CDs though. hehe

Peace,
Tomek.

-edit typo

Is it the consensus that data discs burn more consistently with fewer errors than audio discs?