I mean the burn speed itself shouldn't really be the problem, it probably has more to do with burn quality. 1x is 150kbps, 2x is 300kbps, 4x is 600kbps, and so on. Maybe this is a topic of urban legend, "it worked for me", or old wives' tale, something like that. Most of us use discs chosen for price not top of the line Verbatim Archival Grade gold discs with top-of-the line burners.
In the industries I've worked in, as many of you have worked in as well, there's at least a handful of those "we do it this way..." topics and when you look into the reasoning for it, "oh i don't know" or "that's just the way we've always done it" or "you're just being naughty" or "who cares why, it works" or "$OTHER_REASON". Famous ones include but are not limited to, synthetic oil, dragging a file "backwards", using a shear on cellulose based materials, different methods for broken bolt extraction, bolt torque principles, even tyre pressures.
We're all human, and we have our faults. I'm going to look into this burn speed myth or or not to see if there's any substance to it. CD drives aren't really common any more, but they were, so this one might be a juicy urban legend one.
In the mean time there's two types of disc "burning". Factory made stamped ones, where the disc is physically stamped with a die to form all the tracks. The other is burning like what we do, where a laser etches out a dye layer to expose tracks. Throughout the years it's quite likely that both drives and media followed a similar bell curve of production quality like floppy disks did: early on they were rubbish, then got decent, then got really good as they perfected it, then returned to mediocre quality as cost reduction became the primary focus. Anyways, stamped discs typically don't suffer the same failure mode as burned dye discs do, which is one contributor to why your scratched up old Mac OS 9.0.4 disc still seems to work but the disc you burned last year doesn't read any more.
