What kind of burning hardware and discs do you use for burning backups and/or PCE development?
I burn Taiyo Yuden silvers with Clone CD and on whatever cheap DVD-R drive came in my Dell shitbox. I think it burns as slow as 8x, but I can't say for sure if that's the limit of the discs or the drive or both. It's not gonna be easy to find discs (other than old stock) that're designed to be burnt at anything close to 1x, so I wouldn't worry about it that much.
I was wondering about decent CD backups lately, and one question came to mind: can burned CDs have the same (or close) quality to pressed discs?
They'll work, but I wouldn't say they're nearly as good as a properly made pressed disc in good condition (all bets are off if it's poorly mastered, from a shit chinese pressing house, scratched, rotting, etc.). A burned disc is less reflective, more susceptible to uv/heat/humidity/etc., and more easily damaged (there's nothing but a thin layer of lacquer covering the top side).
I'm pretty much speculating here but wasn't the CDR made to be fully compatible with existing CD technology?
Yes and no. The shorter discs (650mb or less) are compliant with red book specs, but nobody makes 'em any more and longer discs (700mb+) are non-compliant, requiring the laser to move where it was never intended to go. And in any case, CD-Rs are less reflective than a pressed disc.
