Ok...thanks for the responses thus far, but here's what I'm trying to get at... Does burning at high speed specifically affect audio quality as opposed to just playability? And if so, how? Does it curtail frequencies, dynamics, spatial depth? And if that, how much? Is it noticeable? Often I have to burn five cd's before departing for work and my lite-on burns so swimmingly at 48x. Am I really selling my music short by burning at 48x or is the difference negligible? As I said before, the CDs function perfectly on all sorts of CD players. Thanks! -todd

YES! there is quality loss. Very little though. The reason some Cds dont play in some CD players, is because different CD players are designed to take different amounts of data errors. After a certain amount of errors some CD players stop working. Others do work, but the audio quality suffers. Joz

I always burn my clients MASTER CD's at 1X or 2X tops, but 1X is usually what I burn at. That and I use accuracy checking to verify the data was all delivered. If it si a rough mix, I will burn at 8X or 16X, but no more than that. Definitely for a MASTER CD burn at the slowest speed possible. - Doc

I think it's an issue with the rate of error. The faster you burn the greater chance for error.

Perfect! Again, the mastering house that I use () Charlie burns at real speed (1X) and no faster. Also goes to XAbyte too, but that is another topic. Stick to as slow as you can go for burning MASTER copies. For quick reference CD's burn away. - Doc

It also depends on wich brand of recordables you'll use, i use taiyo yuden cd recordables, and the lowest error rate that can achieve is burning at 4x. So burning at 1x or 2x actually produces more errors. People say this has to do with the fact that cd burners now are optimised for fast burning. If you have a plextor cd-burner, you can use plextools to see wich burningspeed with wich cd-r brand works the best.