Great topic!
I've been burning cd's for years now and it's good to see that the prices on cd-burners/media has come down enough for the avg. person to be able to enjoy this.
I'm currently using an HP 8x/4x/32x CD burner and TDK media, which I usually pick up from Costco. I've burnt roughly 200 audio cd's at 8x speed and never have had a problem with skipping or oddities while playing back on either the stock IS300 deck, or my Alpine double-din. The only problems I've encountered was that the cdr media tends to scratch rather easily, although it's cheap to replace when they do.
Hint for those of you who are looking into purchasing a cd-burner: Buy a Plextor or an HP, an 8x drive will be fine. Typically, slower burns will give you deeper grooves in the media and better playback, although a lot of this depends on your drive/media selection. I did notice a slight difference in quality between a 1x burn and an 8x burn, so I would burn 1x audio for high-end non-stock audio systems.
By the way, saw a link yesterday for 100 yamaha cdr media w/ jewel cases for $15. I called the company and they mentioned that it's only certified for 4x, but based on internal testing by them, that they've used it over 10x speeds w/o problems. For those of you who want good quality from slow burns anyway, this might be a good way to go. Here's the link if you are interested:
Model: Yamaha 4x Gold W/ Jewel cases 100 Pack
I'll post in a few days what my experience is w/ the media with audio cd's in my lexus is300.