I burn at 1x for masters. 2x for personal use. Nothing faster. I have used many blanks including the imation, which has been inconsistent and thus I use them for family video editing. The ones that have been pretty consistent are the memorex. As I recall there was a thread a while back that went into the different manufacturers and where there actual discs were made. I think there are not that many actual places that make blank CDs, but rather there are dozens of companies that market these blanks. The result is that you want to get blanks made from the "good" source. Some "manufacturers" (meaning imation et al) get their blanks from multiple sources--thus they are inconsistent. While some work with only one source. I do not know these sources, nor do I know which manufacturers use multiple sources, but hopefully someone that does will join this thread.
Burning a CD
I recently made copies of several hard to find CD's (Lyrita Label) loaned by a friend using my home computer CD burner. I have noticed over a several month period that the recordings seem to be degrading; I am getting a jittering sound. I am using what I think are decent CD's (Imation), and wondered if this is a common problem and what it's cause might be. I am pretty sure it is not my CD player as all commercially made recordings are playing flawlessly. In general I prefer to buy either new or used CD's so I have the liner notes etc, but sometimes that's not an option and I really would like to be able to do this without problems arising later when I no longer have access to that hard to find recordings. Any ideas of where to start.