Slow Burn
Posted on | September 15, 2008 | No Comments
For years I’ve read about the benefits of burning CDs at slow speeds. It used to be that mastering engineers would burn masters @ 1x. Today, though, I don’t think any production CD burners support that slow a speed. 4x is the slowest (firmware reasons?), so that’s what ZenMastering burns at.
Until recently, though, I’ve never bothered testing the theory…it just seemed to make logical sense to me. ZenMastering error-checks all the master discs that leave here. And as long as they have low C1 error rates (average and peak), I’m fine. I don’t want to see C2 errors (even though technically they’re OK)…and CU is out of the question.
The other day, though, I was trying out a new audio disc compiling/mastering program and didn’t know the burn rate was set to 52x. After it spit the disc out in record time, I realized the default was “maximum speed.” Out of curiosity, I ran the PlexTool Professional disc verification application on the disc. This is what I got.
For those who don’t know…
As you can see, the uncorrectable error rate is pretty alarming.
As a comparison, here’s the same album cut with the same program, burners and brand of disc, only at 4x:
I think the pictures tell the story.
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From Ohm to Om reflects the opinions of mastering engineer Paul Abbott, owner of San Diego's ZenMastering.
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