Getting "sour" CD's from Apple, is especially time-consuming. At the current rate, 5% of their installer CD's are junk, right out of the box.
Upon the very first occasion of a CD read failure, I "survey" the CD set and get another.
Huh? Mass-produced CDs rely on a very different technology from CD-Rs or CD-RWs -- they're the same mechanical imprinting as is used on mass-produced music CDs, and little affected by the low-energy laser read mechanisms they encounter.
That said, I've encountered problems with installation CDs -- in particular Red Hat Linux 9.0, which consistently fails on installation as a "Personal Desktop" to a VMWare virtual machine, on the 2nd CD. Seems files "x-pdf*" and after are hosed, inaccessible, or worse.