CD burner minimum speeds

[Einzelherz]

It seems my old(er) burner is done. Every time I tried to make a Saturn backup I created a coaster. When I burn at 16x on my current drive (ca. 2010) I get some errors (Street Fighter Zero 3 (J)--music skipping on some levels).

Does anyone know where to find listings of available speeds for burners? Everything I've ever found only lists the max speed, but for older disc backups I'd love to get as close to 4x as possible.

[Ed Oscuro]

The real (and probably unanswerable) question is how much jitter is generated by burners - you can write as slowly as possible on some burners, but they still write poorly. Unfortunately I don't know any good lists on the subject - some people argue that the best CD burners were made years ago and you can only use Plextor and Taiyo Yuden discs; other people point out that the whole reason for this problem is the design of CD players' master clocks is shit, and modern burners might do a better job with a crystal master clock, instead of relying on a time signal from a component far away.

However, even if modern SATA burners aren't as good as those from years ago, burning as slowly as possible should reduce jitter. If that doesn't work, nothing beats doing some tests to see if other speeds don't work better.

With all that out of the way, your CD burner might be susceptible to changes in your computer, even software. Shut down any program you can (even background processes) when burning discs, and see if that doesn't help.

[bobrocks95]

Different media will also support different burn speeds- at least that's the case with dual-layer DVDs.

[Einzelherz]

My old one was a cheap Phillips combo drive from like 04. It was great. I'm tempted to just trawl for a new in box ten year old unit from a good manufacturer on eBay.

Or would an external work better, since they're slower? I was always under the impression that externals were crap.

[Ed Oscuro]

BTW, you might check this out:
http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

See if you're getting good latency - that might possibly have something to do with it. Sounds like you have some old equipment overall.

[Einzelherz]

So should I run that while trying to burn a CD that so far has proven difficult to get perfect?

[Ed Oscuro]

No, this is a data tool to show how long it takes for data to get dealt with by the PC. Even a fast PC can get bogged down and leave data waiting to be processed.

The primary use of this tool is to handle how long it takes for audio and video streams to be dealt with - any lag means a real-time drop of sound or frames - that's a very demanding application. 4X CD burning is much, much slower, so even if this program shows "red" spikes in lag, you'll probably be more than OK handling burning. However, I do know that CD-ROM burners need to have their buffers full while burning, and those buffers need to be supplied by the PC.

It can't hurt to check it out and see if your PC is having unexpected huge slowdowns which could hurt burning.

In short, it's just a nice thing to check out. It's probably not the most important thing, but it would suck to buy new hardware only to find that the problem still persists.

Edit: Just to be clear, I've not seen anybody talking about DPC latency affecting burns, or advising using this tool to check latency before burning so this isn't a common step. However, the "close programs before running" is a common theme, and it stands to reason that if you've got newer software running on an aging machine, this could uncover a symptom of that. In a vacuum I'd have to guess that you're right and the burner is just old and failing.

[Unseen]

Does anyone know where to find listings of available speeds for burners? Everything I've ever found only lists the max speed, but for older disc backups I'd love to get as close to 4x as possible.

There is usually a writing-speed sweet spot for any particular combination of burner and medium - it is rarely the lowest available speed because manufacturers don't bother to optimize the writing strategies for lower speeds. Instead of looking for a burner that can write unreasonably slow, look for one that can be used to scan for correctable errors on the finished medium instead. Then burn the same image a few times with different speed settings and settle on the one that yields the best quality on your setup.

[Einzelherz]

I was always under the impression that burning closer to the read speed of the drive to be used was the best option. I never quite understood why though. Black magic, I say.