My experience, as well as a bunch of people over here at Microsoft, is that Plextor Can Do No Wrong. You can buy the cheapest, nastiest, ugliest CD, and a Plextor drive will burn something readable.

It may not be readable in all drives, but that Plextor will read it just fine.

Side note for CD recovery - Plextor drives will read crap that just about nothing else will. I have a CD with large surface scratches - won't read in my Toshiba 8x, nor my ASUS 48x, but slap it in my Plextor x8/x4/x32, and whammo, the whole thing works just fine.