A discussion with a Plextor rep....
Any thoughts ? (http://www.musicex.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=MediaCenter;action=display;num=1063648026)
Kinda hard to comment without reading his justification for that statement. Is it there somewhere? I might have missed it.
When in doubt, I always return to the fact that a 1 is 1 and a 0 is a 0. It's either there, or it isn't.
Is it there somewhere?
No. I think it was a phone conversation.
I found it funny myself. Especially after reading some threads here that have said max burn speed is usually best. I don't know. I haven't had any problems playing some that I've burned at max speeds quite a while ago. However a friend of mine burned me a compilation of stuff on stand alone burner a couple pf years ago, and they are shot. EAC can't read them any more. Though it did when I first got them. Maybe it was the cd-r's I used. Maxell's at the time. Only two years old, too. I don't use them now.
This is a very old myth. Rather look in the FAQ for recent BLER measurments vs burning speed.
Also, the person is not a Plextor engineer, just a "tech support person", that is probably someone who's job is to give the answers written on the paper, and transmit the call to an expert if the question does not appear on the list.
what the thread and the other forum is about
I had a recent conversation with a tech support person from Plextor after one of my drives failed. Our conversation drifted to optimal write speeds for achieving the best quality audio. His recommendation is to use a max of 4x when burning an audio cd. I was floored to hear this, having always burned at max speed. I just wondering if you all agree with him or not?
the answer is NO, its been answered here many times 4X DOES NOT produce best results, burn at the max speed of the drive/media
(http://pessoal.onda.com.br/rjamorim/picture91.jpg)
If you are lucky enough to have some C1/C2 (BLER) and Jitter measuring or visualization tool at hand (like Plextools Pro with Plex Premium), you can easily examine your own optimum ... just burn a generated audio image file on the same type of CDR a few times at different speeds and check out what's best in your system.
I used (as an example) a TDK CDR-XG Audio disc and discovered that the C1/C2 counts were falling steadily with falling write speeds down to 4x (The BLER still was well within its allowed limit of 220 when writing at 16x or 20x, though) ... but this wasn't really a representative test which would be far too expensive for me (or a simple waste of money) ...
My conclusion is ... dedicated audio discs should be burned at low speeds just because they have been optimized for standalone devices which stay below or equal to 4x ... data cd's are burned with 16x, audio and (s)vcd will be burned at 12x ... this does not take too long and always led to flawless results in my system environment (I am mainly using Taiyo Yuden and Mitsui/MAME or MPO media) ...