Generally, which is the best burning speed?

[OoAnd1]

If IMGBURN says that it and my media support 2x, 4x, 6x, burning speeds...... which speed should I choose? I've heard that burning at the slowest supported speed makes the best burn....is that true?

Any advice would be great.

[Gen-An]

There is no one best speed. The media used and the drive that will do the burning have to be taken into consideration. Start with burning the discs at their rated speed, if that is problematic bump it down to the next lowest, though that may be a good sign that the media is not up to par.

[Justin42]

I've had pretty good luck burning 1-2 notches below rated speed on almost all media. It seems to give some leeway to the media... so 16x media at 8x/12x, etc.

But it really depends on what brand of media and what brand of burner you're using, so like Gen-An said, there's no right answer.

[Scour]

It depends on writer and media, can´t say the best speed for general

[DrageMester]

Burning at the slowest possible speed will NOT in general give you the best quality; in some cases you might even get the worst possible quality by burning high-speed media at the slowest possible speed.

The optimal burning speed depends on the media, the drive and the firmware.

For a broad range of media, drives and firmware however, I have found by burning and testing that 8x is the safest burning speed for 16x and 8x media. There are exceptions but they are rare. For some drives it's better at 6x or even 4x and in very rare cases it's better at 12x.

If you want a very simple rule and you don't want to burn and test yourself, then I suggest burning 16x and 8x DVD±R Single Layer media at 8x on a desktop drive and at 6x on a notebook drive.

For CD-R media a very simple rule is to burn Audio CDs at 16x and Data CDs at 32x in a desktop drive, and burn at 16x in a notebook drive.

[2Dogs]

I'd just add that there's more to be gained by finding the right media for your burner than there is by tweaking burn speeds - but buying consistent quality media seems to be something of a lottery!