In article , Laurence Payne
wrote:
On Sun, 24 May 2009 12:23:30 +0100, Jim Lesurf
wrote:

I've found that some writers may also simply ignore a speed slower than
they can be bothered to accept. For example, the CD writer I have in my
day-to-day-use home machine won't go any slower than x4 even if the
software tells it to. The DVD writer seems to totally ignore any speed
instructions when used to burn a CDR, and what it produces is useless
for my purposes. Fortunately, the CDR writer seems to do a decent job.

I'm not sure it SHOULD let you go slower than 4X with the media
available today. The trick is to find an optimum speed, not "slower is
better".

Whilst that may be a useful generalisation, I've tended to find that such
generalisations often go awry. :-)

FWIW with exactly the same batch of discs, the above writer produced less
reliably readable discs than another that wrote more slowly. I agree,
though, that writers that refuse to go slower may do so because they are
incapable of working well at lower speeds.

TBH The best CD writer I ever used was a SCSI interface Plextor. If I wrote
TDK CDRs with that for CDDA at x1 or x2 speed then they played on all the
audio and computer drives I could find. Can't say that for *any*
writer/disk combination I've found since.

Doubtless a shop-bought computer will come with the cheapest possible
burner hardware. And, of course, the fact that you have one unit that
burns ONLY CDs (not DVDs) gives a clue as to its age - it's as hard (and
as pointless) to buy a CD-only burner these days as it is to search out
a CD-only player for your hi-fi stack :-)

Again, not quite my experience. I've found that a deliberately chosen CD
writer can work more reliably than a later CD/DVD writer, also specially
bought. However a factor in this is the point I make below...

Also, the CD writer made a much better job of reading some faulty
commercial CDDAs I had than the CD/DVD drive. The CD writer got better
results until the point it admitted it couldn't read any more and gave up.
The CD/DVD drive basically read garbage from parts of the disc and gave no
sign it hadn't read correctly to the end.

But you can slot in something like a Pioneer 115-D (or whatever their
current model is) for so little money, it can hardly be considered a
problem.

Can I? erm... You may not know what machine I use for most domestic
computing... Hints are that it doesn't run Windows, nor MacOS, nor Linux
(usually), and doesn't have 'IBM PC' type hardware. :-)

That said, I've been playing with a new linux box in recent weeks. This
came with a CD/DVD writer, but I've not yet tried it for disc writing.
Spent more 'drive time' installing various OS to see which I prefer. ;-

Slainte,

Jim

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