First, I’m not looking for advice in fixing it - as you’ll see, the obvious way of fixing my CD player is to trash it and get another.
First the symptoms, and then my uneducated guess about the cause. I’m interested in a failure analysis.
My CD player is 8 1/2 years old, original equipment in my Saturn. In the winter in California, it often does not work in the morning - with a few exceptions. It sometimes gives an Error immediately, and sometimes displays the track, then the time, then the track, etc. until it gets an error.
The exception - if a CD is in, and the car is shut off with the CD player on, the CD often plays just fine. However taking it out and putting it in again gives an error, and even turning to the radio, then going back to the CD gives the error.
This basically never happens when the car warms up (and dries out!) in the afternoon.
Some CDs are harder to play than others, but all fail sometimes, and one or two fail all the time. They’re all commercial CDs and relatively old.
That’s the evidence. I know about moisture issues, and this is certainly part of the problem, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t affect a CD already in, and why it would affect a CD that plays, stays in while I go to the radio, then fails when played again.
I’d bet some of the anti-skip memory has failed. The anti-skip feature works pretty well, but could the long delay be an attempt to fill an increasingly faulty memory before it gives up and fails. I’d assume the error rate when reading bits is higher in moist conditions. One other piece of evidence - CDs in the car overnight sometimes get wet from condensation, so I understand why they wouldn’t play, but ones brought from the house fail just as often. Other CDs in the car play fine.
Thoughts car stereo experts?
