As a complete newbie to Linux, please help! I'm using cdrecord to create some audio discs of my own. When I noticed some didn't work so well in the CD player I checked the actual burn speed and discovered (both by physically timing the burn, and by checking cdrecord's own reported 'average write speed) and it always comes out at 8 - despite the fact that I am using 'speed = 4' and 'forcespeed'.

The command I use is:
cdrecord dev= "0,2,0" fs=4096k driveropts=burnfree -v -useinfo speed=4 -dao -eject -pad -audio "/home/shared/audio/track1.wav"

Any ideas on what I'm doing wrong?

Not too sure why the speed won't slow down for you but my personal experience is that I have a better success rate when I burn CDs at the maximum speed that either the media or the CD-R drive will support.