A CD signal stream fed to a DAC is a 44.1 kHz 16-bit signal, period. All you did was force the drive to spin a bit faster to keep tracking, or let it fill its buffers more slowly if it spun at the same speed. The buffers, after error recovery, are what feed the DAC. Assuming an error-free read on two discs burned with the same data (regardless of "pit length", disc material, etc), you get the same bits in the buffers.
There's no "slower bitstream" for the DAC. That's provably nonsense and you can work it out from basic principals. The same bits would come out of the optical interface of a CD player, at the same rate either way. If the CD player has a built-in DAC, the same bits would get fed to that same DAC either way.
I'm sorry, but if this is truly what you believe, it really puts everything else that you said into question.
To give you the benefit of the doubt, I might say that the lenses or lasers on your CD players are filthy, and you're just hearing skips or noise from poor reads and that a slower-written, borderline-spec disk might just allow them the function better. Perhaps your player was interpolating or concealing frames [1] that it couldn't read correctly and failed to correct via ECC and you were just hearing a poorly reconstructed digital data stream.
This sort of confident incorrectness, ignoring the underlying technical architecture, is probably why people don't believe anything that an audiophile says.
[1] https://www.pearl-hifi.com/06_Lit_Archive/02_PEARL_Arch/Vol_...
There's no "slower bitstream" for the DAC. That's provably nonsense and you can work it out from basic principals. The same bits would come out of the optical interface of a CD player, at the same rate either way. If the CD player has a built-in DAC, the same bits would get fed to that same DAC either way.
I'm sorry, but if this is truly what you believe, it really puts everything else that you said into question.
To give you the benefit of the doubt, I might say that the lenses or lasers on your CD players are filthy, and you're just hearing skips or noise from poor reads and that a slower-written, borderline-spec disk might just allow them the function better. Perhaps your player was interpolating or concealing frames [1] that it couldn't read correctly and failed to correct via ECC and you were just hearing a poorly reconstructed digital data stream.
This sort of confident incorrectness, ignoring the underlying technical architecture, is probably why people don't believe anything that an audiophile says.
[1] https://www.pearl-hifi.com/06_Lit_Archive/02_PEARL_Arch/Vol_...