Trouble playing CD-R's

[edstrelow]

I never had much concern about playing CD's burned on a computer because they were always copies of cd's I already owned, so I could go back to the originals which would play well. However, I have recently got a stand-alone cd burner for copying my old lp collection. I am very happy with the quality of the cd copies, I never bothered making cassette copies because I didn't like their sound, but the cd's are to my ear almost indistingishable from the LP's and I doubt that I could pass a double-blind test.

The problem is that the cd-r's don't play well on my older CEC TL5100Z which is my best player. The problem is that sometimes they play and sometimes they don't. When they play, the sound is great, when they don't, the CEC generally lists the contents but won't go any further. Cleaning the lens helped a bit but this is by no means a general solution.

The problem is with both cd-r data and music discs.

Most of my cheaper units play cd-r's perfectly well, and even a 15 year-old Sony carousel, but of course, the sound is not as good as with the CEC. The only other player which will not play cd-r's is a 4 year-old Sony dvd player which will player regular cd's. It won't even list the contents, just says "no disc" on the display.

Does anyone know anything about this issue and are there any tweaks which may allow a machine to play these discs more consistently?

 

[aeriyn]

Quote:

Originally Posted by edstrelow Does anyone know anything about this issue and are there any tweaks which may allow a machine to play these discs more consistently?

Yeah, replace the laser and optical pick-up block. That's about all you can do; the reason old CD players can't read CD-Rs is because they reflect a good deal less light than the stamped variety. CD-RWs reflect even less light.

Some brands of CD-Rs are more reflective than others. My parents have a five year old DVD player (not Sony though, I forgot the brand) and it will play all CD-Rs except Memorex and crappy Office Depot/Costco brand CD-Rs.

 

[edstrelow]

Thanks aeriyn. Thinking that some attention to the power to the cd player might help boost the weak laser output you decribed, I unplugged the power cords of the player and the power strip, and cleaned them with progold so that they might make better contact and thereby boost signal levels in the player. Just after I did this, one disc which the player had been refusing to play, magically began to play!

Still I would like to know if anyone has had any experience with cd-r brands, which may work better than others. I am getting on again off off again performance with TDK, but no performance with memorex on this player.

 

[riddley]

Burning CDs at a slower speed is supposed to make them easier to read. I've found that it's helped with a picky older player.

 

[3lusiv3]

Quote:

Originally Posted by riddley Burning CDs at a slower speed is supposed to make them easier to read. I've found that it's helped with a picky older player.

I'll second that.

I have found Sony & Verbatim CD's pretty good, but depends on the player.

 

[acs236]

I would experiment with different media -- this use to be a common problem. In the late 90s, I had to fish around for media that would work in my CD player. The new ones seem to handle anything. Remembering back, I had good luck with Mitsui Gold media -- I don't know if they still make them. Oddly enough, sometimes you can get better results with CDRW.

 

[edstrelow]

So far I have discpvered that the basic white label Memorex cd-r won't play at all on the CEC cd player, no matter what I do.

On the other hand the Mitusbishi 2002 phono(which is made to look like a 45 vinyl record) is the most reliable.

The TDK cd-r's, also white labels, play second best but suffer from a major defect, namely the backing peels off when I place Herbies Grungebuster on it. I have never seen this peeling with any other disc so I will have to give TDK a miss. Even if I didn't use the Grungebuster, I would still be worried that the peeling shows that the disc is likely to fall apart over time.

So I am ordering the Mitsubishi's for my more permanent recordings. They have a black backing, which many people believe cuts down on stray laser light, and show a blue-green hue on the playing side. I got my first 2 as a sample from Audio Cubes and I am ordering more from them. With Jewel-box cases, they will be about $1.60 each shipped.

I have also discovered a type of tweak regrading the CEC player which makes it more likely to play discs. I remove the cd from the spindle and let the machine cycle through its turn on/off cycle with no disc present. I.e. I close the top of the drawer and just leave it on for 30 secs. Generally after doing this the machine will play at least the above cd-r's. Because this is a top loader, not a drawer machine, I am able to see what it is doing during this cycling: It moves the laser unit vertically up and down several times, as it is presumably programmed to do to try to read discs. I am wondering if this acts to get the laser better alligned for reading discs, or that it resets something in its program. Something like this may be worth trying if you also have an older machine which doesn't like cd-r's.