The burn speed does affect the quality of a disc to a certain extent - I've always just gone gung ho and burnt at full speed, as I trust the abillity of the Burn-Proof / various buffer underrun protection features on DVD and CD burners nowadays. However, it is still wise to burn at a lower-than-maximum speed if your primary aim is data integrity - this ensures that the write laser has that fraction of extra time to burn the data onto the disc surface, resulting in a more definite burn result and (possibly) a more-easily-readable disc for other drives. If you're backing up stuff such as games (or to a lesser extent, video DVDs), it's recommended to burn them at less-than-full speed, possibly even at around half-speed or thereabouts. If you have B grade media onto which you are burning files, then burning at a slower speed is recommended, as you can avoid any possible problems with the poorer grade media in the future. That said, I only ever buy A grade media which I'm sure will work at full speed. I'm a big proponent of the full speed club, though: buy a decent burner, and you don't have to worry about data integrity. :) HTH, Christopher.

I think what Chris is trying to say is: If you use high grade discs and a high quality drive, the answer is no. Introduce any lesser quality to the equation - lesser quality discs, lesser quality writer drive and even lesser quality reader drive (if you are using the discs in another computer for instance), then you add the risk of trouble reading the disc if it was written to at full speed. The moral of the story? Don't buy the cheapest stuff in the store if you want reliability. P.S.: I love my Plextor drive. I can burn even mid grade quality discs at beyond their recommended speed without problems.

This depends on what you mean by "quality". If we're talking about an audio CD here, then in a sense the answer is definitely no - the audio is digital, which means it's either all there (at CD-quality) or it's not. So burning speed will make no difference, because it's writing precisely the same audio information anyway - it's just doing it faster or slower. Of course, the "quality" will be affected if the high-speed burning leads to low integrity of the data. The CD will skip, or not even play at all. But I wouldn't call that low quality - I'd just call it a candidate for throwing in the bin and trying again!

It is true that lower speeds ensure the integrity of the burn process but not the written data. Very poor quality media may suffer from overburning; such that prolonging the burn process destroys the media altogether and making it unreadable. Test a media by burning multisessions at different speeds to see which applies best for a particular brand of (unbranded) cd.

Absolutely. I have made it a practice to use the slowest recording speed for CDs and DVDs that I create, in particular for audio CDs. Most CD or DVD burners are relatively cheap consumer commodities - the minimum acceptable quality for the minimum price possible. The reject rate of optical media is higher when you record at higher speeds. I have been creating optical disks for 10 years with many different burners and have found a direct correlation in the disk reject / error rate and the recording speed. On audio CDs, in particular, jitter increases in direct proportion to the recording speed. A CD player is supposed to handle jitter, but most don't. Increased jitter means reduced playback quality. Also, the higher number of errors on a CD burned at high speeds produce audible artifacts. While audio CDs are supposed to be corrected in the player, a series of borderline errors cannot be properly corrected on inexpensive consumer CD players. The quality of the media blanks also plays an important role in the quality of the finished product. Some recordable CDs and DVDs are quite poor quality. They usually work, but don't expect them to perform well over the long term or in different environments. I have noticed this with CD copies I made for use in the car: the ones recorded at the higher speeds and/or using cheap media often cannot play in cold weather because of disk errors. A little research should be done before you buy optical media blanks. The cheapest ones are usually not very good and some companies simple make better quality media.