Thanks all for the great comments:
I just saw an example of what I mean of when I might read about someone talking about burning "slowly" will improve the data quality and reliability. I personally think this is residue from when CD/DVD burners were slower and less reliable, that the software in particular used to need 100% of the RAM and there better not be anything else going on while the burn is going on. I also think there are more software drivers and while I don't recommend crappy media AT ALL, I think a successful burn will almost occur on all media. That it is the reliability and the staying power of the burn that makes a difference in media quality. Of yes, the speed makes a big difference. I have said before that there is a way to set Nero to keep giving the speed of the burn while it is going on. On inferior media, the speed figured go up and mostly down as the burn gets longer. When I use my Taiyo Yuden's and DL Verbatim's the speed stays steady. Therefore a 8x TY DVD can potentially burn faster than a lower level CMC made media like HP, Memorex, and those "retail store label brands".
On the site of a store that specializes in media, supermediastore(I am NOT giving then a plug, recommendation or non-recommendation), there is a guide to burning DVDs.
The page is here
http://www.supermediastore.com/burningdvdtips.html but below I have the paragraph in which the effect of speed is mentioned:
Don’t speed up.
Don't rush up the burning process, burn DVD with slower speeds. Doing so will decrease the possibilities of recoding errors. If you’re willing to take few more minutes of waiting, burning at slower speeds can brings you more stable and higher quality DVDRs.
However, I mentioned that I like to re-boot before burning/ripping because those are computer intensive operations and if there are some error messages that occurred during a session or other garbage in RAM, I have found that I have the potential for coasters or a burn/rip program not working or working slowly.
If someone is burning a lossy format like MP3 or OGG, or whatever conversion is made, and if we tell MC to convert AND burn, the conversions get made outside of the Burn. The same with asking for normalization, that occurs first, then the burn.
Because to use smaller blocks of CPU use, I always do any encoding if needed, before burning. Then I can listen to it first. Especially with Divx video as well.
I never like to do direct burns to media. I think it is a lot safer for a burner to write to my disk drive first.
With ripping, I have to say that I am fond of what I think is the safest way for me. Many times I might take a full CD or DVD and riip it to a single ISO files. Then I know I have on my disk drive, a bit, by bit, exact replica of my source. Then with some of the various products that allow for virtual drives, I associate my ISO file with a virtual drive and from their I call MC and watch and/or hear my original source and have the same quality as if it came from my the original media. I can also encode the ISO file in MC and break it up into WAV, APE, Ogg or MP3 files, if I want.
In general, to make it simpler for my PC, I separate the tasks of Ripping, Encoding and possible burning a backup. I also will write to my beloved Cowon IAudio U3 portable media player, usually in OFF format to listen to on the road. Or to my Palm PDA as well.
But, I get off topic. Especially with caching on the hardware and software level, the data to be burn is ahead of the game and looked at before burning. Therefore, I have not noticed speed of the burn having any effect on the success or quality of the output.
This possibly might be different if someone is burning from a poor quality source and especially to poor quality, scratched media. I try for this never to occur, but if there is some damage to the source or media, the software might struggle and do some re-writing as well as having the CD/DVD burner struggle as well.
I will mention a couple of cool products that encode separately and use the latest or some specialized codecs, that I have found omn rarewares.org, like oggdropXPd and LameDrop. Simplest LAME and OGG front ends I have seen.
I also think that MC is especially strong in its ripping/burning features and allows us some flexibility to do what we want. Very reliable and FANTASTIC on the Tagging of multimedia files. So easy, the best I've seen. The organization features as well. Plus, for audio playing on a PC, nothing does it better.
Jon