Yamaha makes nice drives, but I wouldn't say that their write quality is clearly better than LiteOn. Here's a Fuji/TY disc burned and tested at 48x on my LTR-48246S:
That is a really great result, and would be hard to beat with any drive.
I also have some results of Mitsui Silver 24x media burns that more directly relate to your question, starting with a burn on my Yamaha CRW-3200EZ:
That is a very good burn, up until the outer edge where some C2 errors show up.
The same media burned on the LiteOn at 24x doesn't do so well:
However, allowing the LiteOn's SMART-BURN system to set the speed (it picked 40x) produces a burn not quite as good as the Yamaha's, but still very comparable:
That's certainly a good advertisement for SMART-BURN, and isn't the first time I have seen a newer, high-speed drive burn with better quality at a higher speed. Presumably the high-speed drives are optimized for high-speed burning, and low-speed burning may suffer as a result.
Finally, here is the same disc tested at 8x read speed:
Dropping the read speed to 8x eliminates the C2 errors at the end of the burn, making for a good overall result. The same holds true for the disc burned by the Yamaha.
My conclusion? The LiteOn is comparable to the Yamaha in writing quality, doing better in some cases and worse in others. Burns from both drives showed some C2 errors at the edge of the Mitsui media, so it may be the media itself that has a little trouble at the far reaches. There is also a possibility that the LiteOn, which was used exclusively for testing since the Yamaha reports neither C1 nor C2 errors, has trouble reading the outer edges of the Mitsui media at high speeds. But I discount that possibility somewhat because I get similar results in other drives using CD Speed.
Were the C2 errors on your Mitsui Gold disc confined to the outer edges also? The discs I tested were 80-minute discs. Perhaps the 74-minute discs wouldn't have the problem.
cfitz