It seems every time QPS announces a new CD burner, two weeks later they offer a rebate and announce a faster one. Well, not exactly. Apple's internal CD-RW is only rated at 8X so a 16X burner gets my attention. Plus it has the versatility of external FireWire. Apple's free iTunes 1.1 software that imports music from CD's or the Internet, does format conversion, and burns audio CD's.
Fire leads the pack.
What was unexpected was the slowness of Apple's Disk Burner software. It seems that Apple's software copies the files to some staging area on the hard drive before starting the burn whereas Toast just burns. This time, I added the verify time to the burn time. Apple's CD-RW took as long to verify as it did to burn. I'm sure this isn't normal behavior.