At what speed do you burn your audio CDs?

[mostapha]

Been using "fastest possible" for 10 years and never had a problem with even half-decent CDR drives. Perfect checksums.

If you're dumb enough to buy iomega or bargain-basement crap drives, it doesn't matter what speed you burn at, because most of your CDs will be screwed anyway.

BTW, I feel the same way about media. There is a difference with regard to what speed they'll work at, but the cheapest CDRs always performed the best for me back when I was using physical media.

[ksandvik]

I've had terrible experiences with the Frys 50 pack cheap-cheap sets. Stopped using them after learning the hard way that you don't want to disk burning bits to lesser quality CD media.

[mostapha]

Right. IDK why but 100-packs always seemed to work better for me than 50-packs.

[guiltyblade]

I usually burn as slow as possible to ensure no errors on my cds.

I've had cds skip or fail when I burn too fast. I now burn at like 1x and have never had any cd fail on me.

[pychonaut]

everything else equal, burning speed makes a huge difference in practice. i mean, nobody really uses CD-Rs anymore but this stuff was frequently tested like a decade ago, using both RL as well as accelerated-aging tests. i recall that discs burned at 4x or 8x speed typically had a number of years longer life expectancy than discs burned at 16x, 24x, or higher.

back in the day, the drive quality and the brand of the media mattered, too. but perhaps not anymore. at least as to the CD-R media, wikipedia says: "Branding isn't a reliable guide to quality, because many brands (major as well as no name) do not manufacture their own discs. Instead they are sourced from different manufacturers of varying quality. For best results, the actual manufacturer and material components of each batch of discs should be verified."