Newer CD-R problem (Denon DCM-270)

[Wray & Ting]

I'm troubleshooting my dad's Denon DCM-270 changer which refuses to play newer CD-R audio discs. It plays commercially produced discs, and older CD-R with no problems (discs burned on long dead CD burners, 10 to 20 years ago). I've recently begun digitizing his LPs, and the resulting CD-Rs don't play. I observed with the case removed that the new CD-R discs won't even spin (or read TOC) but instead "jiggle" 3 times before concluding the slot in fact contains no disc. These new CD-R discs always play perfectly in the CD/DVD drive of a computer, and generally play in other CD players. I have tried several (free) burning programs and usually burn at 16X. Perhaps the oddest observation was that it would spin, read the TOC, and "play" a 15 year-old data CD-R that it thinks contains a single, 73-minute silent track. I have a few ideas about what might be happening, and I'm hoping someone with more experience can point me in the right direction:

• Some component(s) in the CDP need maintenance / are failing and newer CD-R are the first to fail
• Are today's CD-R or CD burners inherently producing discs that the average CDP has problems with?
• Does the CD need to spin for the laser to read the TOC?
• If yes, why would a CDP refuse to spin (not play, just spin) an audio CD-R that contains good data?

My initial thought when this first cropped up was "replace the laser", but the more I investigate, the less I feel something is actually wrong with the CDP, and instead that the discs I'm feeding it lately (mostly Maxell, but also Memorex, Sony, and Onn) are somehow inferior to the discs I used to produce. Can anyone shine a light on any of this?

 

[transmaster]

There is something we used to have to pay attention to back when recordable CD became available. I Have not heard about this being a issue in years but....There were/are 3 kinds of recordable CD’s

• CD-R.
• CD+R. ...
• CD-RW

The first two are write only one is CD “minus” R, and the other CD “plus” R, and the rewritable CD-RW. back in the day some CD recorders would only do one of the CD “R’s”. Some would not do RW’s.

The recording industry were bitterly fighting the recordable CD. Remember the Music CD scam. People were fed a line bovine scatology about the Music CD being for music they had a excise tax given to the recording industry because, you know, if you purchased recordable CD’s you were a pirate. The CD’s marked “Digital” for digital files did not have the excise tax, guess what happened

This war caused CD recorders of the time to be on the picky side.

 

[Wray & Ting]

I do remember there being different variants of (re)writable CD media, but I've only ever used CD-R for burning. There is something different about the discs I burn now compared to those I burned a decade ago, but the advertised media type is (supposed to be) the same. Both my new and older burned CDs are written on various brands of 80 min / 700 MB CD-R, and yet my new burned CD-R will not play in a machine that will play my older burned CD-R just fine. The only differences I can think of, none of which I assumed would be critical for burning a plain audio CD-R, are the computer, optical drive, burning software, and medium, and I have recently used multiple examples of each of those to try and rule out some issue with those variables. It's almost as if there has been some small tweak to optical drives, or CD-R discs, or the audio CD format that this particular player is struggling with. I was hoping someone here may have encountered or know about a similar issue. It's almost enough to make me want to build a Windows 98 machine from old parts to get to the bottom of this!

 

[onwardjames]

Your problem, in my experience with this, is your burn speed.

Yeah, shouldn't make a difference, but when I burn at anything higher than 4x, my old cd players will not read. When I burn below 4x, usually at 2x, all is well.

Good luck.

 

[Wray & Ting]

I can certainly try playing with even lower burn speed. I didn't used to note what burn speed I recorded with, so I have no idea what speed my older disks were burned at. I'm sure they're all over the place.

I'll burn a disc at 2X and report back.

 

[JoeESP9]

Could it be that the Denon doesn't like 80 minute CD-R's. I have seen older players that wont play 80 minute CD-R's

 

[onwardjames]

I can certainly try playing with even lower burn speed. I didn't used to note what burn speed I recorded with, so I have no idea what speed my older disks were burned at. I'm sure they're all over the place.

I'll burn a disc at 2X and report back.

It fixed my headache, hopes it fixes yours. You'd think that burning faster would mean less disc wobble, and better/less errors. Who knows?

Anxious to see if this helps you.

 

[transmaster]

While I have the capability I don’t burn a lot of CD or DVD’s anymore not with flash drives so cheap and much larger capacity. I have not used the jRiver 25 ripper, The DBpower Amp ripper is very good. one thing they both do is it does a check on the material being recorded for issues. It slows down the ripping pricess but it seems to do the job.

 

[Wray & Ting]

Could it be that the Denon doesn't like 80 minute CD-R's. I have seen older players that wont play 80 minute CD-R's

Nah, the older CD-R that play fine are also 80 min / 700 MB.

It fixed my headache, hopes it fixes yours. You'd think that burning faster would mean less disc wobble, and better/less errors. Who knows?

Anxious to see if this helps you.

I was actually unable to burn a disc at 2X. It seems as soon as I load a CD-R into one of my two LG burners, the available speed options (in a few burning programs) are only 48X, 40X, 32X, and 16X, despite having many other speeds listed when either tray is empty. This is why I've been burning at 16X. I have one burning utility (CDBurnerXP) that claims to allow choosing additional speeds, so I set it for 2X and it completed the disc in 2m55s, roughly the same as at 16X, so I suspect it lied to me about actually burning at 2X (also, it failed to play in the Denon). It seems there is some firmware or Windows 10 driver issue that is denying access to slower write speeds. LG doesn't seem to provide a driver for this model, assuming that whatever driver the OS provides will do the job I guess.

What's really bothering me about these new discs, is why won't the player even spin them? It's not like they spin but the TOC can't be read, it doesn't even get that far. From my reading on CDP startup procedures, if the lens fails to even focus on the disc, some players (presumably this one as well) will perform a series of minute rotational wiggles, as if the disc was dirty in the exact spot it was trying to read.

While I have the capability I don’t burn a lot of CD or DVD’s anymore not with flash drives so cheap and much larger capacity. I have not used the jRiver 25 ripper, The DBpower Amp ripper is very good. one thing they both do is it does a check on the material being recorded for issues. It slows down the ripping pricess but it seems to do the job.

I hear you. If it wasn't for my dad having no other digital hi-fi listening solution, I wouldn't be much interested in burning discs either. Personally, I'm very happy listening to all my CDs as FLAC after ripping them in EAC.

 

[IPADave]

Are the new CD-R discs the same brand as the older discs? Is there a color difference between the new discs and old? Some older CD players don't do well with certain colors. I used to buy a brand in bulk that was silver and never had an issue with any CD player. Some of my past players didn't like blue discs and some didn't like green.

-Dave

 

[Wray & Ting]

Are the new CD-R discs the same brand as the older discs? Is there a color difference between the new discs and old? Some older CD players don't do well with certain colors. I used to buy a brand in bulk that was silver and never had an issue with any CD player. Some of my past players didn't like blue discs and some didn't like green.

The brand I've been using mostly these days is Maxell, but also Sony, Onn, and Memorex (all silver type). The older CD-R that play fine seem to run the gamut in terms of brand, but all tend to be of a silver or gold type. In any case, the new CD-R discs are very similar in appearance to many of the older discs that work.

 

[transmaster]

The one thing I learned back when I was burning a lot of CD’s that the brand of CD made a huge difference. I started purchasing CD’s from brands that actually manufactured them. There was a lot of rebranded junk. Here is a article on who makes CD’s and DVD’s today. I see my 2 favorites brands are still around.TDK, and Fuji-film

http://www.ioproducts.com/top-cddvd-selling-companie/

 

[Wray & Ting]

The one thing I learned back when I was burning a lot of CD’s that the brand of CD made a huge difference. I started purchasing CD’s from brands that actually manufactured them. There was a lot of rebranded junk. Here is a article on who makes CD’s and DVD’s today. I see my 2 favorites brands are still around.TDK, and Fuji-film

http://www.ioproducts.com/top-cddvd-selling-companie/

I never paid much attention to brand years ago because everything I burned worked fine, so the older CD-R I have that work are from all sorts of brands. It's only when I started running into problems within the last year that I started experimenting with different brands, but it doesn't seem to matter: new burns won't play.

 

[onwardjames]

I use all manner of brands, most from the Dollar Store.

It's that write speed, man. I truly think that is the issue. Freaking Windows 10. Always thinking it knows best.

 

[dewdude]

I remember back about 18 years ago there were MAJOR differences in CD-R brands...but by 2008/2009 it had consolidated to 98% of the discs under every brand being made by Taiyo-Yuden. I'm sure I wasn't the only one that noticed discs went from being various hues of blue to all being mostly the same color. TY was about the best in the industry. Then they quit making discs. Now I think most CD-R's are made by CMC Pro...who bought all of TY's technologies and makes discs to the same standards.

Modern burners cannot burn at slow speeds anymore....while I think they have the capability, the media is marked to not allow it. The last time I tried to force-burn a 4X CD the entire thing failed.

Burn at the slowest speed you can make work...usually about 12x or something. Use good software. I don't think disc wobble is an issue since the CD-R's already have a "groove" pressed in to them that the laser tracks as it burns.

 

[Wray & Ting]

Well, I dug out my old laptop running Windows 7 in the hope that it would be more receptive to burning at slow speed. I tried burning an audio CD in Windows Media Player at 'Slow' speed and also CDBurnerXP at 2X. The WMP burn took about 10 minutes and the CDBXP one took 11:06. This feels more like 4X based on how fast things were going before, but not totally sure. In any case, both discs refused to play in the Denon, giving precisely the same behaviour as every other failed disc (3 wiggles, no spinning, player treats disc as absent or unreadable).

Modern burners cannot burn at slow speeds anymore....while I think they have the capability, the media is marked to not allow it. The last time I tried to force-burn a 4X CD the entire thing failed.

This sort of describes the type of small change between old and new burned discs that I feel I'm experiencing. Since some others are able to burn slowly with new media it must be some combination of hardware, software, and media that often results in slow burn speeds being unavailable, as seems to be the case with my 16X limit on my desktop computer. At this point I've produced many coasters as far as the Denon is concerned, but they are technically usable CDs.

I'm still barking up this tree because I feel compelled to solve this problem directly (i.e. figure out how to burn discs my dad can play in his Denon), but ultimately I can feel a workaround solution approaching... (different CDP, or a different digital solution altogether).

 

[WobblySam]

When I started burning CDs, there was quite a difference in the media. There were two basic dye colors used at that time. One was almost goldish in color and the other was a blue-green color. Companies like 3M and Verbatim sold the blue-green type. HP, which had one of the earliest computer writers, sold the goldish dye type discs. These discs would read almost everywhere- regular CD players and other computer CD-ROM drives. The blue-green type was almost always trouble - hit or miss in any drive. I don't know if that's the problem as I really don't know much about the media produced today.

Now, this may be a stupid question, but are you performing a "Finalize" operation on your disc after writing it? If not, they won't read. Just asking.

Good luck.

 

[Wray & Ting]

When I started burning CDs, there was quite a difference in the media. There were two basic dye colors used at that time. One was almost goldish in color and the other was a blue-green color. Companies like 3M and Verbatim sold the blue-green type. HP, which had one of the earliest computer writers, sold the goldish dye type discs. These discs would read almost everywhere- regular CD players and other computer CD-ROM drives. The blue-green type was almost always trouble - hit or miss in any drive. I don't know if that's the problem as I really don't know much about the media produced today.

I don't think there's an issue with this player and modern disc dye / colours. All the ones I can buy today are silver type, and some of those older discs that work for me are also silver type.

Now, this may be a stupid question, but are you performing a "Finalize" operation on your disc after writing it? If not, they won't read. Just asking.

It's all good. Believe me, I'd be happy if I had overlooked something fundamental like not finalizing discs.

 

[clinic-audio]

I am using 24K gold CD without any problem on any player

 

[dewdude]

Since some others are able to burn slowly with new media it must be some combination of hardware, software, and media that often results in slow burn speeds being unavailable, as seems to be the case with my 16X limit on my desktop computer.

The ATIP (Absolute Time In PreGroove) of a CD-R contains all sorts of information a CD-R drive needs to write to the disc; among these are supported speeds. Most drives won't go below 16x as that is the slowest speed listed in the ATIP.

I'm not sure the exact science behind why a disc rated at a minimum speed of 16x won't burn properly at 4x...or rather I never actually bothered to look. I'm sure there is some technical reason behind it.

That being said...the oldest disc player I have is a 90's era JVC 200-disc player and It's never had issues reading my 16x discs.