Speedy DVD Burns – Part 1: Introduction & Quality Scanning Speed Examined

When it comes to burning discs, most people who knew anything about burn quality generally had an ingrained phobia of high speed . Common recommendations included burning at “half the speed your media/burner is rated at”, while others would stick to more strict schools of thought such as “only burn at 4x”. Contravening these rules of thumb were only done with the best of media-and-drive combinations, or where time was absolutely of the essence – never mind a wasted disc or the fact the burn might be bad (necessitating another). These ideas aren’t exactly wrong – at high speeds, a lot of things have to go right for a burn to succeed. For example, the disc has to be rigid enough, the stamping has to be spot-on, the mechanism must not have any nasty resonances, the tracking servo should be able to lock on throughout the burn with the disc rotating at over 150-times per second, the laser power has to be strong enough and stable throughout the process, the disc needs to be clean and the chipset has to have extremely good command of laser timing to get the pulses to the exact length required which, at higher speeds, means the laser might be turning on-and-off at a rate of several hundred megahertz. By comparison, at lower speeds, the margins are somewhat more relaxed, which usually contributes to a higher rate of success. But if high speed burning was so impossible , why would so many manufacturers advertise 16x writing on both media and drives? I pondered this when I was investigating faster-than-16x writing, posting a 24x burn from an Asus DRW-24D5MT and a Lite-On iHAS624 B . It was at that time that I realised that the Taiyo Yuden TYG03 so “loved” by these drives were actually up to the task and the “stagnation” of 16x burners for many years likely hid improvements in drive mechanisms and chipsets that improved 16x burn reliability before 18x, 20x, 22x and finally 24x burners hit the market. So, back in 2024, I started an investigation into high speed (16x) DVD…