My car CD player (about 5-6 years old) refuses to successfully play a new storebought book-on-disk CD. Yet another car CD player (brand new) plays it no-prob.
What gives?
Have they been turbo-charging CDs lately such that the olde school players can’t read them?
It could be copy protected. Look at the case and make sure 1) it actually has the Compact Disc logo, and 2) it doesn’t mention any kind of copy protection. If it’s copy protected, it isn’t really a CD - take it back.
Your system may not recognize the format that the cd is recorded in. I know it is hard to think of a 5 or 6 year old system as old,but let me tell you…
We got a computer with a cd drive that malfunctioned. I replaced the drive and burned a cd. It would not play and was not recognized ( well, was recognized as a blank ) by our stereo cd player. I thought I was going crazy because the cd would play on the computer. I had the dully bright idea to try it in the boom box. Played fine. Our stereo system did not recognize the MP3 format that the songs were in. MP3 was invented after our stereo. I feel stoopid calling it a stereo system, even now.
lurker, if you burnt the CD in MP3 format there is no earthly reason why it should play on a CD player. They are utterly different formats.
Your boom box is obviously a dual-format device, designed to work with MP3s. No ordinary audio CD player will work with MP3 CDs - they are not designed to. Dual-format players are starting to become popular though, so you can fit much more music on a CD by using the heavily compressed MP3 format.
I had a first generation Technics CD player (SLPJ1 for those who care) bought in 1985.
At that time there were no CDs longer than 64 minutes. (give or take a minute).
That player had a horrible time playing “newer” disks that were longer. I later read (if I’m using the wrong terminology here, please correct me) that the armature that moved the laser wasn’t designed to fully extend the entire radius of a CD, and would do crazy things when reaching those outer fringes (for those who don’t know, CDs play from center outward). Skipped and warbled horribly when it got to those outer tracks.
It gives me a headache just thinking about it.
I just want to say that I still have a SLPJ1 and it’s working beautifully. Much better than the 3-5 years you get out of current CD players.
I serviced consumer audio for 10 years between 1990-1999 and ran into numerous instances where the first & second generation car CD players had a fit playing certain CDs. We were unable to improve the situation at the repair bench. The vendors finally started issuing new D/A convertor boards for us to swap out. I don’t know if this is the OP’s problem or not.
Lot’s of cd players will not play burned cds.
Look on the player for the logos cd/cdr/cdrw/mp3. Whatever logos appear determine what formats it accepts.
Yeah I gotta go with the copy protection as well. I’ve heard lots of stories of new disks not playing at all on standard cd player.
I’m impressed that your SLPJ1 still functions. Did you buy yours in the 80’s like I did? Maybe mine just suffered from old age.
It hurt to throw it out since it still played the majority of my CDs.
And I loved the fact that it had indexing!! Try to find that feature in a reasonably priced model today!
Hampshire it’s not quite that simple. I have encountered devices without any indication of recorded disk compatibility, and they have worked. Compatibility depends on the sensitivity of the read head in the player. CD-Rs reflect less laser light than a pressed CD, and CD-RWs even less so. The only surefire way to tell if a player will read a recorded CD is to try one out.
MY CD Player is ancient (about 1987), yet still fully functional and does the job. It cost a fortune when first bought.
It has no problems with any CDs or CD-Rs. These things are supposed to be backwards compatible, but different CD Players have always displayed different sensitivity to these things. Maybe your car CD player is worn out and your new CD is also a bit duff. The combination of the two is enough to make playback to fail.
I’d just burn the CD onto a CD-R and use that. Problem solved.
Funnily enough my old CD Player doesn’t play MP3s. Or MPGs. Or WAVs. Or DVDs. Nor does it keep my beer cool. I guess that’s because it’s a CD Player.
I’ve seen that feature on older players, but never heard of an actual use for it. Are there discs that have index marks within the tracks?
Too many to mention but for instance:
Genesis has a song Supper’s Ready on the CD Foxtrot that’s about 24:00 long.
It has about 9 parts to it (listed as such on the booklet) but it is only one track. But if you have indexing, you can see the indices as they are passed and you could cue directly to say index 9, which would be the last 2 minutes of the song.
Many classical CDs are indexed.