I just bought a BenQ DW1620. If you read Dolphinius' review, you can see the max read speed of DVD-R is at 8x. However, I've noticed that some of my DVD-R disks can be ripped at the same speed as single layer DVD-ROMs at 16x max. Those disks would also get up to 16x in CD speed tests. Upon further investigation I found out that this was happening with approximately 70% of the diks that I had previously burnt with my Pioneer 107D. The 70% of the disks that got up to the high speed, they all had very good and uniforn PI/PO tests. The other 30% were had some fluctuations in the PI/PO tests.
The strange thing is that I burnt some DVD-R media with the BenQ1620, with even better PI/PO than the Pioneer 107D. However, all the diks burnt with the BenQ could be ripped back only at the normal 8x max speed. In CD Speed tests the BenQ burnt disks were limited to 8x max also.
I wonder whether anybody else might have run into similar situations. Any thoughts on why some DVD-R media can be read back at double the speed? Any possible way to get 16X ripping speed on all DVD-R media?