Hi Ed,

  Ed> Specifically, although my CD burner will burn at
  Ed> a top speed of 32X, will I get a "better burn" at
  Ed> a lower burn speed? ...

The short answer to your question is: yes, probably.

About three years ago I completed a project to convert
a great deal of my own music over from long-archived
reel-to-reel tapes to digital form. Out of this came
two CD albums of which I wanted to make about 30 copies
each to send to friends and family, mailing them to
people across the US and out of the country. The first
batch I made using the fastest speed my burner was
capable of.

Mistake. Big mistake. Fully a third of the people I
sent them to wrote back saying their copies had a lot
of distortion in places and in others was outright
unlistenable. That's when I learned that music CDs are
best burned at slower speeds. So all replacement copies
and copies burned since were made at a slow speed. As
with most other things in Linux, if you want it to work
well, you'd better be prepared to do some tinkering and
be willing to make some mistakes.

Now I have an iMac and Toast, so do all my copying
using that, not my Linux machine. I just do whatever
Toast tells me to do, and have never had a problem.

That's my experience.

-- 
Lynn David Newton
Phoenix, AZ