Burning cd's for my modestly high-end system...

Must respectfully disagree with the "CDs are CDs" claim. Stick with name brand such as TDK, Maxell, Sony, Fuji, Imation, etc. Office Depot, Memorex and those of the ilk are prone to error and will miss track and pop more readily. And they do sound differently under close scrutiny. The Matsui are probably the best of the lot, but expensive.

Celtic, I've been using Memorex Black CD-Rs exclusively for the past 2 years and never had a bad disc. Burn on lowest possible speed.
I also use Mitsui discs.
BTW, Matsui is a baseball player in NY Yankees :)

You are right though, CD-Rs sound different and for some recordings I do prefer Memorex Black because I found them to sound a bit smoother than Mitsui.

I burn CDs using Nero7. I like it better than Roxio.

Hi, in my professional DVD copiers I have found the following:
Pioneer 112 sounds better than any other under $60 burner, and the LG (frgot the model) "top of the line DVD burner" sounds better than that at $89.
As for the disc, in CDs TDK and Tascam sound very similar and I'de use nothing less. However for taste the Maxell's have tubey mid-bloom.
There are gold discs that sound much better in total balance than either of those, but those are the least I'd use.
Place your computer on some type of zorb pucks as there's alot there that can cause mechanical or electro-mechanical vibrations.
There's a few other things, like demag the discs, or put them on a disc lathe to perfectly cutting them.
I will only speak of the actual physical end of it and I guarenty that this will make a dif to even a Sony boom box as a playback device. Especially the choice of disc; where as the other features may take better gear to detect. But if a Rotel (which I liked) can, than the $500 players are either worth the investment or not.
Forgive me being jaded.

I put sheets of styrofoam above and below my CD drive in my PC and then 2 large chunks under the PC tower and it made a noticeable improvement (cheap vibration control). Also try Herbie's Black Hole CD Mat.

The best sounding CD-R's according to my ears are:

Taiyo Yuden (Maxell PRO and some Maxell Music CD-R's are TY)
Mitsui/MAM-A (also rebranded as MoFi, HHB, and Apogee)
Ricoh (even the ones made in Taiwan sound good)
...maybe others that I don't know about

While all CD-R's carry the same bits, they do induce varying degrees of jitter into the playback stream if they are of inferior quality.