Okay, so it sounds too weird to be true. But when my wife turns left in her 2001 Hyundai Elantra the CD player clicks loudly and the CD often skips. But it’s not a sound through the speakers. It happens even if the whole radio/CD player is turned off, plus it doesn’t sound like it’s coming from the speakers anyway. But the sound doesn’t happen EVER if there’s no CD in the CD player.
Now, it only seems to happen when she turns slightly left, not hard left. I haven’t been able to determine for sure if it’s the acceleration due to turning, or if it’s more the angle of wheel, but it seems to happen even at slow speeds, so I’m thinking it’s not the acceleration. But how could the steering wheel being in a particular position influence anything?
I’m a car-electronics installer, and I haven’t heard of this before.
I’d try varying as many different things as you can to see if you can narrow it down.
–Turn signal on or off while turning the car?
–What if you change the engine speed while turning? (That is, try accelerating during your turns, or conversely, take your foot off the gas completely and coast.)
–Any effect if you tap on or around the car’s radio?
–Factory radio or aftermarket? If it’s an aftermarket, sometimes you end up with a little gap above the radio, and people sometimes push CDs into that gap accidentally while driving at night. There could be a CD or three bouncing around in there on top of the radio.
–My best guess is that there’s some looseness (or a broken part) inside the CD player mechanism, but somehow when the CD is ejected, the mechanism moves into a position that tightens everything up. Try putting a CD in there, turning the radio off (or even turn the entire car off), and tap around the face of the radio and see if you can duplicate the noise.
It’s odd that the clicking still occurs when the radio is turned off. Otherwise I’d assume the spinning CD is rubbing up against something. Even more apparent when cornering since the cd mechanism is usually suspended or dampened and probably pushes or pulls toward the thing it’s rubbing against.
Are you using CD-R’s by any chance? One of my car CD players really doesn’t like the cheap-o $10-a-spindle CD-R’s I use. They play fine when the car is stopped, but but there’s noise audible from the player and they skip like crazy over any little bump or turn.