George,
Write speed is a function of how good the media you are writing to is. In other words I believe that just because a disc says it is capable of 52x, doesn't mean that it really can. There may be flaws in a certain batch that prevents it and will work much better if slowed down. I choose to write at slower speeds because I'm not just copying discs all day and it doesn't take that much more time to just write slower anyway.
That's just me.
Wally
