I see a lot of people talk about running scans on their discs with nero or kprobe to check for jitter and all this other stuff. Now, forgive me for my ignorance, but what are the benefits of an excellent burn/scan/test compared to a lesser one even if the data is intact on either disc?

This is a complex subject, but let's just say that there's a relationship between how good the burn is and how long your data is intact. Disc and burner combinations which show a bad burn usually result in corruption of the information on the disc at some time (even immediately), and can certainly make it unreadable. On the other hand, with good burns, the data remains intact for years. Therefore it could be said that it's good practice to make some sort of assessment of how reliable valuable data is being stored, particularly if you have a new set of discs and need to go back to them over months or years.

That said, the CD Freaks members are pretty obsessive about burn quality, how to measure it and what it all means. It's not necessarily something you need to get into that deeply, unless you find that side of things interesting.

In case of Video Quality of viewing and for the data integrity of burnt data.

Beter quality burns can also effect how many players a disk can be played on. A disk with low errors has the best chance of being playable in most players while a disk that has high (but within limits) error might not play as well on some players (but would play fine on others).

hey imkidd57,

I find this side of things quite interesting and i see the forum members talkin about offset correction and stuff , i really would like to get into this technical info so i can investigate what's better also. I've heard cracks in bad burns but i want to learn how and when this problem becomes audible. I've been recommended specific media but i would like to test other media i have more easily avaiable for buying here; that's why i want to learn about those objective tests i can make. Where can i find tutorials and more technical papers??? All i can get is "do like this" or "do like that" and i still dosent understand the diferences, what's going on inside those rippings and burnings. I mean, isn't there the right paper to start on technical stuff in the subject?