Inaccurate computer CD reading?

And I'd like to add an additional question:

I wondered what's behind the recommendation to burn music CD's at very low speeds (2x, 4x) when both the drive and the media are capable of very high speed recording (up to 52x)?

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I can give a little info here: First of all, even though both a Computer CD (CD-ROM) and a CD Player play Audio CD's- there is one big difference. The CD-ROM standard uses 'error-correction', as indeed just One misread Bit would 'crash' the program/data. The CD-ROM in your PC has extra electronics/logic to prevent this. You can consider your CD ROM drive 'backward-compatible' with 'RedBook' or Audio CD which came first.

So, therefore, if 1 or 2 bits are misread while just playing back music, you may not even hear the difference.

Nsgarch - so my guess is that when you burn at faster speeds, you may lose more bits, and therefore lose some fidelity. On the Linn website (in their FAQ's when asked whether Linn players can play CD-R, etc.) they talk about the loss of bits when burning a CD-R, but when I play a CD-R on my Linn Classik, I can't hear any 'loss' of fidelity.

Hope this helps.

As a CD burner rotates the disc at a higher rate, speed stability goes down and any wobble gets magnified. Both of these issues will cause the pits being burned to have sub-optimal shaping. In the best case, this will cause misreads that fall below the error correction threshold and just cause hash and glare. In the worst case, especially with older CD players, the disc will have so many errors it won't even play.

I've experienced this firsthand, and slowing down the burn speed always made things better.

Redbook CDs use Error Correcting Codes (ECC) also. The Redbook standard assumes that no CD will be a perfect pressing, so there is a lot of redundancy built into the data.

BTW, one bit could make a big difference if it happened to to be the most significant bit in a sample.

I think that some ripping programs ignore the ECC info and hope for the best, to get better reading speed, but I've never looked into this area before.

I have tried buring at 4x and still can't get them to play back with any luck on my computer.I have an older system
and must burn at 1x,ourelse I get severe dropouts on the music.