This post was originally posted at sinewalker.blogspot.com.au on 10 February 2006.
I think I may have figured out the issue with my CD recorder. It seems to fail more when the weather is hot (as in, more than 32° C ambient). The internal case temperature would be in the low to mid 40s then, and this is probably close to the maximum operating temperature for the device (a SONY CD-RW CRX140E).
So, either I confine my CD writing to early in the morings on hot nights, or I evaluate some sort of cooling solution.