Older CD Players not playing CD-Rs.

[charles 1973]

My denon 1500II CD player from 1988 played CD-R's. I'm guessing however it was more by accident then by design. Some of the older units will play them, some won't. Perhaps it has to do with the use of different laser readers, Or the program which they are burned. I burned mine at a slow speed hoping it would be better.

 

[JURB]

A stamped CD has pits that are exactly ¼ wavelength of light in depth. this causes (theoretically) 100 % cancellation of the light. In practice it is not 100 % because nothing is perfect, but it beats the pants off of photographic darkening of a thin film layer, which is how a CDR works.

A CDRW has an even weirder way of doing it. It crystallises a layer, which can then be remelted into an amorpous state by a higher power LASER.

Basically nothing is as good as the stamped CD. the problem is not the reflectivity but the opacity of what would be the pits in a stamped CD. It can focus just fine, but it needs that signal to track.

What that means is that if you had the ability for example to add a digital output for an external DAC will not work. I could be wrong on certain units but I doubt it. Thing is, the actual output is the sum of all the detectors and with schmitt triggers, the signal simply is not the problem, tracking is. If it don't track it don't play no matter what you do.

What I have found over the years is though I cannot stand the way they design things, Phillips players have always demonstrated good compatibility with CDRs and CDRWs, even the earlier units. Also, higher power rad LASERs are not the answer because the difference seems to be in the detector. Sanyo/Fisher players had LASERs twice a s powerful as some and tracked no bett. And then I worked on a few Pioneers that actually had lower powered LASERs that wouldn't skip if you dropped them. Talking maybe an inch at the front, which is really good for players that have no buffer. And then Yamaha had a different LASER than most and they seemed to track well, but they wenrt bad from heat. I had a few of them, literally spray some freon on the LASER and then it would play for a little while. And this was back when replacement LASERs cost alot of money. At times we did pay the sixty bucks for the part, charge the guy a hundred and everyone was happy. But back then, CD players were not a dime a dozen.

Even back then, regular folk didn't want to put money in anything and said "Well I can get a new one for... ..." and the literally thought they were getting more for less. Well that happened to TVs and now they are like toasters. Literally throw away. No TV shop gives a free estimate anymore that wants to stay in business. Fact is less than half of them are economical to fix. So if you like your TV enough to gamble about $40 that it CAN be fixed and find out the (OUCH) price (because parts are ten times the cost of the set now) you MIGHT not have to learn a new remote and menu.

This only partly applies to DVDs. They are a different animal. In a combo CD DVD, there are two LASERs. If there is only one LASER assembly there are two LASERs inside of it. I'd have to look it up but I THINK they use a different wavelength of light which means the pits will be a slightly different depth. It does have a smaller spot size actually.

And ALL of them, it is almost not a LASER because it is focuissed, bent out of shape. When it hits the surface on the bottom of that disk with all the scratches and fingerprionts on it, it a alot bigger than when it hits the reflective surface. If not, there would never be one that didn't skip.

 

[George W]

Try burning the CD-R at the lowest speed (X1 if it will go that low) and see what happens, I had to do this for a neighbor that had an old SONY boom box that had trouble reading my "faster" burns. :scratch2:

Mark T.

EXACTLY. This was something I learned by trial and error. Only 1X home-made CD-Rs would be read on old players I had. Every once in a while the color of the blank seemed to make a difference. I avoided blue and green blanks from Circuit City, and ordered the 'clear' blanks made at the time by PNY.

 

[Jazzmuso]

I have a Yamaha cdx 1110 player - it plays some CDR but not others. It plays some NEw CD's but not others. It seems to have a problem with re-releases of old material that were originally vinyl only recordings. Some of my George Benson and SAl Jerreau cds's are not playable on this machine. Not sure of the format or what the problem is.

 

[StimpyWan]

In my experience (19 years in the CD/DVD replication & mastering field), older CD players don't recognize a CD-R, because a CD-R isn't strictly a CD-DA audio format. A CD-R was originally a computer disc; for either audio or CD-Rom purposes. So, basically, it's a later invention, another format, that older (the earliest) players were never designed to read and playback.

 

[StimpyWan]

Also, as noted above, a replicated, pressed audio CD meets the strictest guidelines for formatting and pit structure. The TOC info is located in the correct Lead-In locations, Time Code that doesn't shift or jump, and data that is easier to read, since the pits are pressed/stamped into the polycarbonate structure, and not burned. This makes a replicated CD much easier to be universally read.

Early CD-R & CD-RW burning was a bit of a crap shoot, much dependent of the PC drive used to burn the CD-R, the formatting software, the burning software, the CD-R blanks, and the method of burning. Slow burning speeds work best for an audio CD-R, since there is no redundant data on audio discs, unlike Rom discs. ROM formatting, under a certain size, allowed for redundant data, to be written in adjacent sectors, to allow the PC playback drive to hunt for the data, if a disc sector was corrupted in one area, and readable in another. Audio never had this feature, which higher speed burning of pits, made worse.