You might want to check the manufacturer's web site on this. CD writers have to vary angular velocity as they write. This means that they have to move much faster as they start writing in the middle than they do at the outer edge of the disk. One way that manufacturers keep costs down is by varying the write speed forby the angular velocity. So you start writing slowly and speed up as you get near the outer edge of the disk. I'm told that CD readers seldom actually run at their maximum speed because most of them are not tuned well enough and most CDs are not made well enough. CDs use a (Reed-Solomon I think) error-correcting code; so it should be possible to detect the error rate and reduce speed if it's too high. I don't know if CD writers can use a similar trick. Personally, I use an 80 euro 4x CD-writer. Low speed generally means high quality at low cost. JDL Nick Webb wrote:
Hi,
I've got a Yamaha CRW2100S (16/10/40) CD Writer, but when using cdrecord with 10x certified CDRWs it drops down to 8x even though I specify "speed=10". I've seen similar things with drives that can re-write at 4x only doing 2x, but I assumed that is because cdrecord thinks the media is not good enough. I'm pretty sure the media I'm using now is good enough for 10x, is there anyway to 'force' cdrecord to use a certain speed?
Thanks. -- Nick Webb http://www.uidaho.edu/~nickw/