Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions Sony CD players not playing all brands of CD's?

Every now and again I'll get a new off brand CD and either of my Sony MegaChangers will not play it while all of the other universal or CD players in the house and including the automobiles will play them perfectly fine.

Saturday I received my new Buddy Guy CD (JSP Records) in the mail from Amazon and whenever I tried to play it in the Sony players it sounded like it was encrypted or something similar, put it in every other CD player in the house and cars and it played fine. I've noticed this with a couple of other Cd's in the past including another very recent off brand CD by Mofro.

Does Sony do this with their players or is it just a bug that happens every so often?

Hi RickF,

Going back decades, Sony CD players and changers have always been much more sensitive than other brands to the slightest CD imperfections or tiny dust specks or scratches. I have a couple of Sony mega-changers as well, and one of my Rhino CD compilations began skipping the other day. I took it out, inspected the disc and tried playing the offending tracks on my cheesy portable Panasonic (which will play anything!), on my Oppo DVD player, and on my laptop DVD/CD drive. The disc played perfectly on all three.

So I took a cloth and some CD cleaner gunk and cleaned the CD, put it back in the mega-changer and it plays perfectly. Back in the days when the magazine I edited used to do damage tests on the ability of CD players to play damaged discs, the Sonys were always poor performers.

Try cleaning your CD.

Regards,

Alan

Thanks Alan, I'll get a cleaning cloth on the disc and see if that remedies the issue, I really didn't think about doing that because it went straight from the packaging to the player.

Yes, historically our MegaChangers have been notorious about skipping with the least of imperfections on discs and sometimes embarrassing whenever we'll have folks over and playing both players on the no-delay shuffle mode. Sometimes these MegaChangers can be downright finicky.

Time to drop the megachangers and go media server.

Too old school for that stuff ... upon further inspection I found the disc had a scar on it, right out of the package.

C'mon, never too old(school) to learn something new.

I find that some players have trouble playing the cheap thinner discs (weigh and use a micrometer on a few random CDs in your collection - there's a fair amount of difference in the CD "standard" apparently)... my Greatest KISS album is nearly 60% as thick as other standard CDs in my collection... and my Black Sabbath - Never Say Die is pressed unbalanced - my H-K CD carousel won't play it all the way through (starts skipping at track 8 I think)... but all the crappy players in the house will play it.

I've also found that car head units seem to get "stretched out" by playing thicker CD-Rs, and have trouble ejecting standard "pressed" CDs after a while.

Bren R.

Hi,

Yes, it happens, albeit pretty rarely. I have a CD pressed in Germany that skips on a couple of tracks. It drove me crazy until I examined it against the light and there was a weird undulation in the surface below the plastic protective coating, obviously an anomaly in the manufacturing. It's the only CD out of about 900 that was defective from the get-go.

An engineer who retired from the Canadian division of Panasonic/Technics told me a horror story about a big Toronto-based pressing plant that did a run of a rock CD (tens of thousands) and no Technics CD player would read them. The plant had to import some expensive device from Philips, who licenses and oversees the CD pressing standards, to analyze the problem. It was the cut-off in the edge of the pits, which was too gradual, sloped a bit, I guess, and the Technics players couldn't distinguish the "land" from the "pits."

Fortunately, it was all cleared up before millions of CDs were pressed.

By the way, on the Media Server front, all hard drives eventually fail. So if that happened, I'd have to re-enter all my 600 CDs onto a new hard drive. No way. Life is too short.

Regards,

Alan, that is why you have backups on other HDDs. I run my server in a RAID 1 mode, for an instant back up and then do another back up of those discs onto a removeable drive every few months if I have added any new content.

That's why it's best to use a redundant drive configuration. e.g. mirrored drives (two drives reading and writing the same data).