Is my Duo-R dying?

[FM-77]

Recently, my Duo-R's been acting strange. I pretty much only play Ys IV on it (a cd-r because I'm playing the translated game) and sometimes when I enter a new area, the game just stops -- no sound, nothing--for 20-30 seconds, then it starts working again. It's like the loading times are insane, except it doesn't make any "loading noise." What could be the cause of this? Is the laser dying?

[GUTS]

My regular Duo would do that to me, I think it was just the media my games were burned on since real games worked perfectly.  For some reason it was almost like the CDR would "heat up" or something, which I know is ridiculous, but that's how it seemed since it would play fine for a little while then start taking ridiculous amounts of time to load the longer I played.  I read it depends on the color of dye that the CDR uses, apparently the gold bottom discs are really good for Turbo CDRs (if I remember correctly gold was the best, I was using crappy blue bottom discs which I think were the worst).

[Black Tiger]

When I first got my Duo RX, I didn't know that the lens was dying.

It seemed to play original CD games fine, but had issues with any kind of cdr. When I played through Ys IV with the english patch, after about 1/2 an hour the CD music would cut out after maybe a minute each time it loaded a new area,

I would up having to swap the save file over to my original Turbo Duo that I bought at launch which has been thoroughly thrashed and abused, but still plays all games just fine.  

I wound up having to replace the Duo RX lens after it pretty much stopped working all together. But now it works perfectly.