This is crazy. I just got schooled by the gurus over at
http://club.myce.com/. That forum is packed with data on CD-Rs, drives, burning, reading, testing, etc.
1. The only thing that is important is figuring out how to create a good quality burn. It's the "result of the right drive, with the right firmware (usually the latest, btw), with the right media, with the right writing speed, with the right software".
The key is to figure out which speed your specific drive performs best at when burning in order to create the best burned CD-R. (You might be able to look up your drive's test results at Club Myce.) Lower burn speeds do not always mean a better burn. It seems that they recommend moderate burn speeds, not too fast and not too slow. For example, I'm going to try 16x and compare it to 12x and 24x using Nero CD Speed to test my burned CD-Rs.
2. The fact that the console has a 1x drive is irrelevant. The read speed of the drive doesn't matter at all when worrying about compatibility or performance.
3. ImgBurn and Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs are both recommended at Club Myce.
4. To test and compare the quality of your burned CD-Rs, use a free program for scanning, Nero CD/DVD Speed. BUT, the accuracy of the scan is determined by the drive in your computer.
The drive in your computer is probably the most important aspect of this discussion! They have done extensive testing of drives at Club Myce. You can go there and find out which drive you need for the highest quality burned CD-Rs. I haven't gotten this far.
5. Finally, I also learned that we don't have to worry about damaging the drive with a low quality burn. Lots of people think (assume?) that using CD-Rs is somehow bad for our consoles.
Source:
"Matching burn speed to the read speed of your ancient CD drive in your console is not the correct way to think about the problem of compatibility. Burning a compatible CD means matching the type of disc, the disc burning strategy in the firmware, and the burn speed in an optimal combination for any particular burner. Now, that's a general description, but it means that you often have to experiment to find the best settings and best media for any burner you have. And the very slowest speeds do not always produce the best burns.
We do tend to recommend TY media, as it has been consistently good for a long time. There are other good blank discs however, and Albert mentioned a couple earlier.
Silver reflective layers should be very good, but if you are archiving data for decades, you might want to use gold, which does not tarnish. For most purposes, a gold reflective layer is not needed, and just because a disc uses gold for this layer does not mean it is good in other respects, like the dye formulation, or the quality of the construction (bonding). These other considerations will often be more important and negate the supposedly high quality, "archival" designation of the gold discs.
I'll let someone else discuss the various qualities of the dye formulas with you."
--Kerry at Club Myce
"There's the reflective surface, which is physically made of gold, silver, aluminum, and/or other alloys, which will produce part of the effective color you see on the bottom of the disc in many cases. Effectively, every reflective surface that's not gold will just be silver in "color" and will not contribute to the overall color you see on the bottom of the disc. Gold, however, will have an effect similar to mixing yellow + any other color in the read world.
There's the dye used, which when paired with the average silver-colored reflective layer + clear plastic used to make the disc is what typically gives you the overall color. For CD-R, the color of the dye can be deep blue, light blue, green, or light green in most cases. None of the dye types you run across are really clear, though some are fairly light in color.
There's the substrate (I'll call it plastic) put on the bottom. This may be clear (most popular), jet black, yellow, or any of a variety of eye-catching colors. Yellow: Some manufacturers in early days used yellow substrate to give the illusion of discs made with a gold reflective layer, but now it's just another hue for discs meant to look fun or unique with no performance difference. Black: There have been discs with black bottoms sold. Occasionally they have been proclaimed to have superior performance, but the top CD-R manufacturers (in terms of quality) never put any emphasis on use of a black substrate, and it too is regarded as just another color option. Clear: the most widely used substrate is the default clear option. It's what's used on pressed CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, and all that. Given that this is the most widely used "color", it means that when you see most discs, the color comes from the dye (and, if a gold reflective layer is used, the gold).
All this put together:
--Don't expect to have a perfectly silver CD-R. There's going to be a color, however slight it may be.
--If you get a CD-R stated to have a gold reflective layer, it will be obvious that it's gold, and that the manufacturer hasn't faked it with yellow substrate. The color will likely be a pale yellow on the edge of being a pale green (depending on how you view the disc), not a sharp yellow which obscures the color of the dye.
--(I think I'm repeating this point but) Gold reflective layers have a slightly lower reflectivity than silver-colored reflective layers. Beyond that, reflectivity shouldn't change much due to dye or anything else, so any other colors won't matter as much.
--As you mentioned, the dye used will potentially affect results. But you should be going less for dye and overall quality…and each of the dye types you mentioned (AZO, cyanine, phthalocyanine) has been used in quality CD-R from one manufacturer or another in the past. (Verbatim/MKM, Taiyo Yuden, TDK, FTI using TDK tech, Ricoh, Hitachi-Maxell…none use or used the exact same dye formula as the others for discs they produce/produced. I'm sure even FTI has slightly tweaked the tech they got from TDK for their discs.)
--The best CD-R discs you can get will be, when viewed from the bottom, green (green/light green dye + silver-colored reflective layer), blue (light blue dye + silver-colored reflective layer), or for certain uses golden (pale dye + gold reflective layer). Certain old CD-R might combine gold + darker blue dye, but unless you stumble upon rare media, this isn't necessarily something you should expect to see."
--Albert at Club Myce
