4X is a pretty solid speed for production masters. There are many who still insist on 1X.

If it's just for reference discs, 16 is fine...

Generally, somewhere around 20% of the drives top speed is a nice place to be. Of course, every drive/media/combination may be different as far as the BLER is concerned.

For the most part, it's often just whatever works for you, your CD burner, how it works with your blank CDs, and the condition of your clients' CD players.

For a long time, I heard (and believed) that 2x burns were/are still the most reliable and best way to go. I've rarely had trouble with 2x burns. Conversely, the higher burns I've done brought the most rejects or complaints from clients. You may have the same results as well.

Unlike old tube and belt-driven (Analog) electronic devices of the "old" days, (tape, LPs, radios, etc.) some of the original CD players are approaching 20 years old now, and many still operate quite well, with little or no maintenance. Unfortunately, not well enough to handle borderline CDr's. (it's a lot like the state of DVD'rs and recordable discs nowadays.) Their lasers may have drifted a bit out of calibration, or were never all that good enough to read the trickier (harder to read) CDr's that came out on the market in the 90's.

THus began all the myths and legends surrounding CD burn speed. Mostly, it's just machine-to-machine's laser tolerances being pushed to the limit. You've gotta find what's best for your studio, and your clients.

These days, the reliability of my burners (Plextor, Sony and Panasonic) are about as good as it's going to get, ditto for my CDr blanks. My mastering software seems to work the best at 7x (Yeah, go figure; 7x, not 8x!) and my CDr duplicators seem to max out at 16x. (They'll do up to 32 or 54x, but I just don't trust that high a burn for copies of a copy. They might play, but who knows how my clients' players will handle 'em.)

Lots of experimentation and asking others to try your burns is usually the best way to go, although it IS time consuming. 2x is never bad, btw., it just risky the higher you go.

Thanks guys! very cool factoids! 8-)

burn at 8x or 4x. 16x is way too much to lose audio quality or clusters in audio files.

To all the good advice given above I will only add a few notations from my own experience. I generally run series of about 50CD-s for the band / choir members as memorials of concerts.

1 - when I have problems with burning, generally the last track is most affected. A quick check is to listen to that one on my old low-priced portable CD Walkman. If it runs there, it is generally OK.

2 - some of my clients have machines that simply refuses to read CD-rs of any kind whatsoever. After having tried all blanks I can find I have simply given up on them. Generally, these are real old stuff

3 - my old CD-burner did not produce reliable CDs above 4x. I have had no problems with my new burner set at 16x (it burns around 8x then from some reason). Obviously it depends at least partly on the burner.

4 - some brands of blanks are simply notoriously bad. I try to avoid them.

Gunnar

Maybe this is obvious but...

Always burn "Disc at Once" and not "Track at Once".

And use high quality blanks designed specifically for audio.

I like these for most audio burns:

http://store.mam-a-store.com/digital-audio.html

And these for the master-grade/critical stuff:

http://store.mam-a-store.com/standard---archive-gold.html

Taiyo Yuden are without question the best. They even play in my '87 Sony CD player. (No other brands will.) The Japanese made Fuji CD-Rs are made by Taiyo Yuden. Stay away from the Chinese/Taiwanese variety.