I am suprised that our most recent article hasn't raised any question over here. http://www.cd-rw.org/articles/archive/highspeedmediaerrorrates.cfm Just in case you missed it - check in out. The quality/performance of current high speed media is according to these test unacceptable.
It seems that many of these 32x-40x medium are from Prodisc and CMC. On the other hand, the big guys are more conservative: Ritek and TY have just released its 40x media while Ricoh, Mitsui, etc are still limited to 32x.
To be honest, despite having two 32x drives I have gone back down to 16x in most cases. I don't think any of the discs out there produce particularly good results above 24x, even the best.
Jase: I've always heard your opinion about high speed burns and I'd like to ask you a couple of things: How do you test for burn-quality? What is "good enough" on your opinion?
Well first I test the C2 errors with a couple of low-grade readers, and these have invariably had problems with fast-written CDRs. I also have looked qualitatively using a picky car stereo, portable CD player, PS2, MD/CD separate deck and DVD player and all of these drives have more problems with 32x discs than 16x or 24x. With the 16/24x stuff most of these drives have no problems; with 32x the problems rise dramatically. And I have tried a number of brands with similar results. Basically I don't trust >24x recording. Too risky.
