Optical drive firmware hacks?

Is it possible to force my lite-on to go 12x on an 8x TY valuline? My Sony dru840 does it right out of the box. Scans are quite good too. The only reason I got the lite-on was because they get EXTREMELY good reviews. Oddly my sony drives(4 of them) get bad reviews and ive had only 1 hiccup in 1000+ discs. Probably closer to 1500! I have the, LH-20A1H firmware vers. LLOD (The latest). Does somebody produce their own firmwares? I dont care about the warranty. Its already payed for itself. I love running benchmarks.