CDRLabs.com

All I can say is: WTF?

This is a "good" batch; my Samsung can burn these at 18x, and everything can burn 'em at 16x.

But when I try to burn these at 8x on my 1655 (which produces the best quality results of all the burner/speed combos I've tried), I'll get a few that hit 8x and at few that peak at 4x.

What in the world is going on?

These are "good" in that they don't show the all-too-common error spike around the .7GB marker, so I'm at a loss as to why this is happening.

The error scan I did of one that only burned at 4x showed a massive PIF spike near the beginning of the disc that does not show on the discs at 8x.

Maybe you have solid burn turned on for all media and when it tests the beginning and end points it detcts something it doesn't like and slows down the burn. Try turnig it off for known media, and also turning off the wopc might help if its truly OK stuff that something in that drive doesn't like.
Mine has done that on ocasion too but my 111 seems to do that sort of thing more often, starts out fine then drops back speed or crashes out with a error.
ALSO you might want to try clearing leaned media to give it a clean table again of what it thinks your media needs to burn well.

MonsterMan wrote:But when I try to burn these at 8x on my 1655 (which produces the best quality results of all the burner/speed combos I've tried), I'll get a few that hit 8x and at few that peak at 4x.

Are you by any chance running the BCHB firmware on your BenQ DW1655?

That firmware has been problematic for some people, myself included, and one of the problems is a fall-back to 4x writing speed.

If you are running BCHB firmware you could try downgrading to BCGB or BCDB firmware.

Solidburn is off...and yup, BCHB.

I've been burning them now on my 1620. Forgot it actually does abit better

Hopefully BenQ will update the firmware soon...BCHB has been out awhile.

As DrageMester suggested go back to BCGB or BCDB you might get better results.