 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: wjk
Date: 2004-09-27 15:38
My car CD player occasionally will not recognize a CD thats in mono or is a digitalized "old recording." Its possible the lens is dirty and I've ordered a special "CD-Auto" lens cleaning disc designed for a front loading car CD system. Any suggestions? Is this just another frustration/limitation of the digital age?
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Author: idahofats
Date: 2004-09-27 16:34
I have one and only one CD with the same problem. It plays perfectly in my 1985 Fisher CD player (the 60s rock compilation being the same vintage,) but neither my computer's floppy drive nor my car player will recognize it. My guess has been that a refinement of encoding has occurred, which does not recognize poorly or primitively digitized media.
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Author: msloss
Date: 2004-09-27 17:50
Sorry - encoding hasn't really changed since the introduction of the Red Book standard. If it is a commercial CD, the manufacturing is not perfectly consistent, and you might occasionally get a bad one that works in some players and not others. It also might be dirty enough or scratched enough to defeat the error correction algorithms in the deck. Car CD decks tend to be the least tolerant of variation in CDs. They can withstand the vibration of a car, but don't seem to like different thickness, dirt/scratches, or in the case of CD-Recordables -- color.
Before you goop up the lens with a cleaning solution, try cleaning the CD first (radial wiping from center to edge, not circular).
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Author: CPW
Date: 2004-09-27 18:26
My burned Cds will not play in my truck but play in my friends car.
There is a long wait before the tracks load on the truck player
Likewise for CDs from the "from the vault" website offerings and even the Bondade legacy cd.
Maybe Mark or GBK know why...is it the encoding??
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Author: JMcAulay
Date: 2004-09-27 18:32
Mark gives a good point. Cleaning the lens of a CD player should be sort of a last resort to fix a problem.
In all my CD-ing, I have found one disc and one player that were strangely incompatible. After playing five to ten minutes or so (starting anywhere), it would simply stop. I never discovered why; it just wasn't worth searching heroically.
On occasion, a disc that's been used a lot may have enough scratches so it avoids playing properly. On most discs this problem can be polished away. An aircraft windshield polishing kit will do the job, and now there are CD polishing kits available. They may not be easy to find, and they are not $2 items.
Polishing is not only ineffective on some discs (due to different materials used), it will actually damage them. So before using, try a small area toward the center from the track with the finest cloth or paper on the kit to ensure that it does not visibly scratch the disc.
Regards,
John
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Author: msloss
Date: 2004-09-27 19:35
I recommend Sony's FOF (For our Friends) CDs. Thicker blanks, but need to be broken in properly. ![[grin]](http://test.woodwind.org/clarinet/BBoard/smileys/smilie5.gif)
In all seriousness, there are two principal differences between brands of CD-Recordable, neither of which have anything to do with the data burned to the disc. The first is the color. Without getting into the chemistry and optics of it, different brands use different dye technologies to make the substrate that gets "burned". In addition, the reflective backing is not identical from brand to brand. Although the laser pickups are generally set to the same wavelength, the optics are going to vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, the beam intensity may be different, as is the gap from laser to disc, etc. All these variables conspire to make some brands of CD player incompatable with some brands of CD-Rs. It has gotten much better in recent years, but I still run into the problem, even with fairly new decks.
The second is thickness. The CDs are made of bonded layers, and some brands are just ever so slightly thicker than others. More spinning mass can mess up cheaper transports. Similar but different problem is that the holes in the CDs are not always perfectly centered (shades of the LP days of yore) which can also unbalance a transport. Just enough wobble will mess up the tight tolerances of a laser pickup.
Finally, look at the playing "face" of the CD-R in question. Sometimes there are bubbles, ripples or other inconsistencies in the acrylic. They make so many that some garbage slips through. Some CD players can read through the defects, others can't. The CD burner might also write an error through an imperfection like that, rendering the CD useless. Either way, for 20 cents throw it away and start over.
You think clarinet players are tweaky -- only people worse are audiophiles. Ok, worse than that are clarinet-playing audiophiles (Antony Michaelson comes to mind).
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Author: OpusII
Date: 2004-09-27 20:15
Try to burn them on a different brand of cd's and burn them very slow! The burning wil be more precise. How better the cd player is...the more risc you have that some cd's just are unplayable, because it just reads to precise.
Eddy
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Author: CPW
Date: 2004-09-27 21:17
thanks for the info.
that explains the differences.
Would you recommend a particular CD-R over another?
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Author: Ken Shaw ★2017
Date: 2004-09-27 21:18
I've been reading that there's a growing problem with deteriorating CDs. It's not just the defectively made ones that turned a bronze color and became unplayable. It's that the layers are delaminating around the outer and inner edges, letting in oxygen that corrupts the aluminum layer the information is written on.
Also, the information layer is at the very "top" of the CD, just underneath the label. Any writing with a ballpoint pen on the top of the CD will distort the recording layer and introduce errors.
I'm holding on to my LPs for now, and thinking about getting one of the newer terabyte hard drives and backing things up there.
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Author: Topher
Date: 2004-09-27 22:42
Many newer CD players are made to refuse writable and re-writable CDs for fear of copyright infringement. On the other hand, some CD players are just picky.
PS to idahofats, I would be quite suprised if your computer's floppy drive read your CDs. A floppy drive reads those all-but-extinct square metal and plastic things called "floppy discs." ![[wink]](http://test.woodwind.org/clarinet/BBoard/smileys/smilie3.gif)
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Author: DavidBlumberg
Date: 2004-09-27 23:28
I like the Fuji CD's, Maxell, Sony - try sticking with the name brand ones.
Don't get no name as they just don't seem to work quite as well - I get more coasters from them.
Also defrag your harddrive before burning.
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Author: idahofats
Date: 2004-09-28 00:14
Topher:
Too many years of floppies...actually my 5-inch floppy drive will hold a CD, but only once...and the squirrel has to run much faster than he's used to.
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Author: diz
Date: 2004-09-28 00:31
LOL @ idahofats ...
Without music, the world would be grey, very grey.
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Author: msloss
Date: 2004-09-28 01:27
TDK has been known to have problems, and I have had issues at different times with Maxell, Scotch/3M, THAT, and others. You pretty much have to experiment with your equipment to figure out what is going to work. Overall, I would say that this is a case of getting what you pay for, much like reeds. The cheapy CDRs are not meant for archival recording/storage. They do decay, and are really not supposed to have a shelf life of better than 10 years, realistically much less. If you want consistent, archival quality CDRs, you have to go for Quantegy, Apogee, etc. which use ceramic coatings and gold laminates to resist oxidation. If you don't want to pay up, treat the others like cassette tape -- disposable.
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Author: OpusII
Date: 2004-09-28 06:12
I ussualy go for the brands where I don't have to pay for the big names!
Fujitsu, Best Media... etc and on special occasions....philips.
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Author: idahofats
Date: 2004-09-28 16:23
Hi, Ken:
Regarding deterioration of CDs, is the delamination occurring simply from poor quality control, overuse, age, extremes of temperature or insertion into floppy drives...? Anyway, great thought on backing up everything on a dedicated drive.
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Author: idahofats
Date: 2004-09-28 17:50
Alseq:
Great article, and will have to explore the links at the bottom of the page. I would assume that what goes for CDs also works for DVDs, so handing my copy of "The Benny Goodman Story" over to the next generation might be a losing proposition. But that old LP collection sits there even now, just awaiting the caress of a diamond stylus...
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Author: hans
Date: 2004-09-28 23:51
Re: Eddy's comment above about burning speed..... when I bought a new car with CD player last year, I found that CDs burned on my PC would play for a short while, then start to skip, so I took the car back to have the CD player repaired.
The car salesman advised me to burn at no faster than 4X and that solved the problem.
Hans
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