I haven't found there to be much difference between CDs. There are only a few manufacturers who actually make CD-Rs, CMC and Ritek are the only ones that I know are still operating. There may be one or two others. Everyone today just buys discs from those companies and rebrands them. It's not as big of a market as it was 15-20 years ago.
I have run into issues with some CD burners not working well with a particular type of dye. It's been some time, but if memory serves me, I had an old CD burner that just didn't like Phthalo dye based discs. My new, cheap USB CD/DVD burners seem to take any type with ease, so there's a possibility that your burner has an incompatibility. It wouldn't be the manufacturer necessarily, but the makeup of dye layer.
Sometimes I had success by slowing down the burn process to 4x or 8x instead of high speed.
I don't know about on a Mac, but on PC, there are programs called CD-R or Media Identifiers. These programs read the data on the disc and tell you the manufacturer, the type of dye used (cyanine, phthalocyanine or AZO) and the capacity.
