Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[KeystoneCop]

I have been trying to find out if there is a difference in the Quality of Cd's based on the write speed.  My ears don't seem to hear a difference, but some say record at a slow speed. I have written at 24x and 4x (again to my ears it sounds the same).


Ok .. What do you think?  (No I don't want an ear test)
I would like to know if there is a technical reason.

[MachineHead]

Feel like doing some reading? Check out HA and the Hardware Forum. Pio2000 has done some incredible testing on just about anything cd-r.

But, one of the threads over there had a similar question. No, it doesn't always pay to reduce the speed of a burn. It can, in fact, introduce errors.

But you never know...

[KingSparta]

the only thing i have seen is if you set it higher that what the cd is rated then there is errors.

the disk tested was a few 16x disks i found and burned them at 40x

if i burned them at 16x everything was fine.

[rocketsauce]

My ears don't seem to hear a difference, but some say record at a slow speed.

It would be doubtful that you would hear a difference unless there were audible errors (glitches/pops/clicks/etc) that were the result of burning at too high of a speed. I think generally, burning at 4x instead of 24x is not going to make the sound "clearer" or "better" somehow.

If your burner supports burning at 24x or 48x or whatever, I'm sure that it will do it just fine. The problem is that the burner isn't the only link in the chain. I think a bigger problem is that a lot of the newer high-speed blank CD-Rs are more prone to errors no matter what speed you burn them at. As MachineHead said, Pio2000 and several other people have posted on this topic over at HA Forums.

That being said, I burn discs for a friend to listen to in his car while he drives for work. If I burn them at 8x, he can play them but can't skip from track to track. If I burn them at 4x they work perfectly. The cd player in his car isn't more than 4 years old, but it's just finicky. In my car and also on my 15 year old hi-fi cd player the discs work fine no matter what speed I burn at.

Rob

[Bartabedian]

It basically has to do with errors written during a burn and the back-end player's ability to "work" past those errors. More errors are written into a CD-DA disc at higher record speeds. Most current CD players do what is called "oversampling", or taking bits around the error and fitting them into the space that is created with the error. This all happens very quickly, no human can hear the audible difference.

Some older CD players though (much older 8,9 10+ years) may have trouble playing high-speed recorded discs with either no sound at all or the wonderful tick-tick-tick glitch some may have heard before.