A lot of good information, some not so good. I would just go over to cdfreaks.com and pour over all the information there. I've increased the quality of my burns many times over since I did research on that site. A few things I've learned though that might help people:
-A good drive makes a big difference, the plextor, and the pioneer on cdfreaks are great, but not everyone wants to pay 3 times the amount for a drive (I don't)
-If you have a mediocre drive you can still make excellent burns just takes a little more trial and error.
-Get the latest firmware for your drive, or cross flash to a recommended FW. (cdfeaks has a thread for every drive you can think of)
-Don't run any other programs or surf the web while your disc is burning, try not to cause too much vibration around your computer while it is burning (don't bang it with your knee
).
-Get a stack of decent media and start burning a test image (try and make it an image that fills the disc, a wii game is good) at all speeds, and then check them with cdspeed or a similar program. Compare the results.
-Buy some different a few types of media (crap quality, medium, and high quality) and do the same thing. You will probably notice that your drive tends to burn better at certain speeds, and certain media tends to like being burned at certain speeds. You will probably find a sweet spot with a certain brand of media that likes being burned at the same speed your drive likes being burned at.
It takes a long time, but you will save yourself the frustration of DRE's in the future.
Or you could just buy a $75 plextor drive and burn anything at any speed, ok that might be a little exaggerated, but not much, from the graphs I've seen my best burns are at best average for most people with that drive.
My 2 cents