Welcome to a "tips of the trade" page!

  At what speed should I burn CD-Rs?
Well, if you're burning for yourself, it's always up to you. Can you burn without any errors if you use your burner at 40x speed?

If you're burning from you your hard drive, you can usually take on some major speed with modern burners. The most important thing - don't push either your burner or the blank media to the max. If you CAN burn at 48x speed, and the blanks you're using say 40x, you may want to play it safe (even for yourself) and not go above 32x. Think of how little time you're really saving with that difference. Not much. And re-burning is more of a hassle than shaving a few seconds off of your burn time.

There are a million studies out there online about the difference between discs made at, say 24x speed versus those made at 12x speed. I'm not sure if I agree with them ... but that's just me. Some traders may specify "Please burn no higher than 12x speed." Again, you have the option of either declining to trade with those folks, asking why their preference is the way it is (and that's what I'd suggest that you do - you may learn something!), or simply following their request (which also works well).

Certain brands of blanks burn better at slower speeds, and guarantee that they will also maintain their integrity for a longer time than other "lesser quality" blanks. Some of the major/expensive brands like Taiyo Yuden will burn at any speed, but recommend slower speeds.

The truth is that scientifically it probably all comes down to the brand of your burner and how potent its laser is, the type of dye used on the blank media, and the "depth of the burn" that results from the combination of the two. I imagine that taking all of this into account, the speed of your burn CAN conceivably make a difference in the end result. But is it perceivableto the human ear? And despite the concerns that are often written about, will we all be worm food long before our CDRs lose their integrity, regardless of the speed at which they were burned?

Do I need to dub in real time?

Without jumping up and down, pulling out my hair, and screaming and yelling "AAAAAAAAAAH!" ... I will simply smile and accept the fact that from a newcomer this is a completely reasonable question. And I'll try to offer a logical answer.

Yes, it saves time ... but what about the quality?  I mean, isn't it true that a reel-to-reel tape running at 15 i.p.s. is better quality than a tape running at 7 i.p.s.?

The answer is that the quality of a cassette is sacrificed in a high speed dub.  Let me try to sum up the mechanics of it.  When you take a cassette recording that was recorded (mastered) at 1 7/8 i.p.s. and play it back at twice the speed, the heads of the deck do not have the opportunity to read all of the data (a.k.a. the music) efficiently.  It is true that mastering a tape at a faster speed (on a deck that provides this option) makes for a better quality recording because a longer surface of the tape is being used to preserve each second of information. In every instance, though, a tape should be played back at exactly the speed in which it was recorded.

The most obvious difference between a high-speed dub and a regular speed dub is a loss of high end.  Try it!  Dub a tape in regular, than in high-speed mode, and the difference will surprise you. One little known secret is that if you receive a tape with a very screechy, trebly high end (e.g. cymbals that are obtrusively hissy), you may want to intentionally run a high speed dub for yourself to correct the problem in the master.