by Sarge Fri Jan 12, 2018 2:45 pm
I'd like to update this and let folks know a little more about what I've found out. I think I may restate some stuff, but here's the latest scoop!
I ended up ordering a new CD burner... and by "new" I actually mean that it's an old PlexWriter 16/10/40A. Before that, I was using a GCC-4240N that was built into an old Inspiron 8200 laptop, which is a Hitachi/LG drive. That combined with the Sony discs gave me burns that weren't perfect, but better than anything else.
With the new drive, I've improved the performance at least a little bit, with an interesting catch. It still misses the intro audio track occasionally on the 4-in-1 disc, which seems to be a great test of how things are working, as it turns out. But it managed to nail it like five times in a row, which is great compared to what I was getting. But the other thing is that burning at 1x with the Sony discs was worse than anything I'd used. 4x was much better, which leads me to conclude that the statements about modern-ish media not really being designed to handle burn speeds that low is absolutely correct. So the 1x burning does me no good with this drive, at least so far.
I also tested with the Taiyo Yuden discs, and performance was completely identical to what I'd seen with them when I burned at 4x using the laptop drive, and not really much difference that I could detect at either 1x or 4x, to boot. So the TYs seem to handle the low speed burn better, but again, I think it's just the quirks of this Duo.
Just for kicks, I also tried burning Syphon Filter 3 for PSX, and didn't get it to work with the TY discs at 1x. I need to try a different game, though; there could be problems with my rip. But my old model PSX has also always had issues with reading CD-Rs, and I never tried to tweak the pot since retail games always worked perfectly. No sense screwing that up! (I also don't use the old PSX anymore, since the PS2s run most of the games flawlessly, and I can also get component out of the PS2 easily.)
EDIT: Tried out burning Policenauts and Tales of Phantasia for PSX, and they work. The videos even play. Very interesting. I'm not sure the disc movement sounds quite right, though, so it wouldn't surprise me if it was still struggling a bit. Smooth FMV is still better than I ever got back in the day, so that's pretty cool.