Burning at 1x

Blank Media
#1

I am nostalgic. While most of my friends believe burning an Audio CD is much worse than burning all the mp3 files to a data disk, I still make them (also… because I don’t own a portable mp3 reader :bigsmile: ). It’s been two minutes since I remembered when I had my first burner… a Waitec 2x2x6 which wasn’t able to burn subchannels and cost me 200,000 Italian liras (103,29 Euros or 138,05 USD). To make good quality disks, I always burn my personal audio CDs at my Plex Premium’s minimum speed (4x). But I wonder whether I could burn them at 1x! Is this is a drive or a disk limitation or both ?

Also, what is a CD-DA ? :confused:

btw: I just beat Half Life 2 :sad: :sad: :sad:

#2

Whether you are talking CDR or DVDR, it’s a mistake to assume that slower burn speed means better burn quality. Depending on the combination of drive and media, the opposite could be true.

#3

Indeed. If you have a look at my results with Verbatim and CMC, it is clear that lower speeds does not translate into lower BLER. Jitter does tend to decrease at lower speeds, but look at the 4x CMC burn - it is higher than at 24x.

Of course, a lot depends on the drive/firmware and the media. The situation nowadays is that both are optimized for higher speeds. I found firsthand that 4x burns are generally inferior to those done at, say, 16x on the Premium.The only exceptions was MFSL’s Ultradiscs, rated at 12x. Such discs are rare nowadays, and at least BLER-wise, offer no advantage over common top-grade media. I wish I had done jitter tests with those gold CD-Rs to compare to Taiyo Yudens but I did not keep the test discs and don’t feel like throwing another $20 on what I feel grossly overpriced media.

Plextor Premium, like probably all drives on the market in the past few years, does not support speeds below 4x. It is a hardware limitation and as such cannot be worked around.

CD-DA stands for Compact Disc Digital Audio, i.e. audio CD.

HTH