I got a little boom box and at work I like to listen to the headphones once in a while. So rather than take my CD collection to work, I copied some of them and put my own labels on. I don’t have a fancy label-planting gadget, so I center it best I can. They work well enough, but I can see the disk as it spins. On some of the disks, you can definitely tell the label is a wee bit off center as it appears to move in and out as it spins. So my question is, will this bit of eccentricity hurt the player? I liken it to an unbalanced fan blade wrecking the motor, but I wonder how significant this is and how tolerant a CD drive is for unbalanced disks. Should I go out and buy a nice gadget to center the labels or is it insignificant?
The drive will attempt to spin up the CDs, and if it can’t get it up to speed, it should gracefully give up.
I’ve fed badly labeled and even warped CDs into drives, and the worst that’s happened so far (other than the drive ejecting the disc) is the sound of the disc wobbling or scraping on the tray for a second or two.
Never, ever use labels on blank CDs. Even the smallest mis-alignment will cause the disc to vibrate, causing undue stress which will shorten the life of your player. Labels also have a habit of peeling off over time, ruining the disc. Use a felt pen instead (Sharpies are good) or, if you have one, a laser printer with a special attachment for printing on discs.
Every time I see those rows full of CD labels at Best Buy & Comp USA, I can’t help wonder if it’s a conspiracy by the media companies to make your hardware break down so you have to buy more of it sooner…
CD players are fairly tolerant of eccentric labels, because the rotational speed is low (~200-500 RPM, depending upon where along the track is being read) compared to high-speed CD-R/RW drives (up to 10,500 RPM for a 52x drive). What you don’t want to do is stick a recordable CD disc in a high-speed drive with an eccentric label and attempt to access it, otherwise you might wind up picking bits of polycarbonate shards out of the guts of your drive. And possibly picking the guts of your drive out of your walls.