The CD player in my 2002 Civic has the exact same issue with many
otherwise high-quality CD-R discs. It seems it's a bit of a picky
player, but I've found the solution.

Use Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs. They work perfectly in my Honda - just the same
as pressed CDs.

If you've never heard of Taiyo Yuden, that's no surprise -- they don't
sell their own branded discs at retail in the US, only wholesale;
however, they've manufactured discs in the past for Fujifilm, TDK,
Verbatim, and other brands you might have heard of. They are generally
regarded as one of, if not the best, CD-R and DVD-R manufacturers.

Buying CD-R and DVD-R media retail is a tricky proposition -- primarily
since brands and the actual manufacturers differ. One month the pack of
TDKs you buy might be made by Taiyo Yuden and they will be really good
discs, and the next they might be made by, say, CMC, a manufacturer
with a lesser reputation. So you have people saying "TDK is great" and
someone else saying "TDK sucks" and they might both be right for their
respective discs with their respective players. So as a word of advice,
if you care about quality, buy by manufacturer, not brand.

The online store that stocks these with the best reputation is
www.rima.com; you can also find them at many other places, such as
meritline.com/cdrdvdrmedia.com (both owned by the same company, but
sometimes different prices on each site) or supermediastore.com.

Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs can also occasionally be found in retail stores, but
it's a crapshoot. Fujifilm-branded discs that say "Made in Japan" on
the packaging (but not "Made in Taiwan") are most likely TYs.

Hope this helps.

Nate

<snip>

This may not be of any help to you. But, I had a similar problem with
a completely different system that I solved by taking the action you
propose. The record speed that seems to work best for me is 8x, so you
might try to experiment a bit.

I also found it necessary to turn off the multi-session function,
which seems to be on by default in Nero.

However, it is possible that the Honda simply will not read
home-burned disks for some arcane reason.

Are these .wav files or .mp3? If mp3, try burning a CD with .wav files
and see if that works. 2002 CD players should read .mp3s with no
problem, but you never know.

Hope this helps. Report back, please.

Elliot Richmond
Itinerant astronomy teacher