Burning CDR's at x8 or below

I have a Samsung SH-S202N & a Liteon DH20A4P (which I hardly use) to burn CDRs to play on my Rega Apollo CD player. The Apollo is fussy about burn speed and will sometimes not be able to find later tracks (easily or at all) on a CD burned at x16 (which is the default lower speed for most of the blank CDRs I use - Verbatim and so on) I've been trying to find a way to force a burn at x8 which is what the manufacturers of the Rega say is the maximum burn speed that their player can read. I found that using Nero I can only burn at x16 wheras CDBurnerXp burns at about x12 if I set it to x8 or below.

These CDs will play pretty well on the Rega but I'd really like to get down to the x8 they reccomend. Has anyone produced firmware for the Samsung that will let me override the speed detection and allow it to burn at x8 or can someone recommend a burner (IDE & available in the UK) or software that can solve my problem.

Thanks!

Your Rega Apollo CD player has no way of knowing at which speed the CD-R was burned - it can only detect how easy it is to read according to a number of parameters.

Forcing your existing drives to burn slower is unlikely to improve the compatibility.

So the better question is, how do you burn CD-R media that your CD player will play?

LiteOn DVD burners are generally mediocre to poor CD-R burners. I'm not sure about your Samsung (some Samsungs are good with high quality CD-R media).

My first suggestion is to try other CD-R media than you have tried so far, e.g. Taiyo Yuden CD-R media if you haven't already tried it.

My second suggestion is to get a CD/DVD burner known to produce good results with CD-R media, e.g. Optiarc or Pioneer drives, and burn at that drive's optimal speed, which with modern burners and media is usually around 16x - 24x.

Should be like the 1st gen 203 drives. Rather good, but often not good enough if a very picky player is involved.
CMC and Ritek made discs aren't that bad (in terms of playability) either, but they are not top class as TY.
I second that.

Michael

Thanks guys. I decided to buy another drive and the one that seemed to be fairly easy to obtain was the Optiarc 5200. I read on here that it is the same as the 7200 series except for the lack of Lightscribe (which I don't use anyway) so it sounded like a good idea. I picked it up this morning and have found that it will allow me to burn everything I can throw at it (verbatim/maxell) at x8. The Apollo seems happy with the few discs I have made with it so far. I might experiment a bit with faster speeds but I wonder if I really need to bother if this works as well as it seems to.

Thanks for your help again.

Yes, they are both very nice drives. The difference is that the 5200 doesn't support DVD-RAM burning (neither drive supports LightScribe).

You're welcome!