CDR quality / reliability problems

Folks,

Over the past few years I've noticed that CDRs played in my car start to
break up after 20 minutes or so of playing. It starts with a small amount of
"popcorn" type background noise, then gets worse, then eventually it sounds
just terrible AND the CD skips and stutters at the slightest bump in the
road implying a laser / tracking problem. I always assumed it was my car's
aging CD player, and maybe the fact that CDs get very warm after they've
been inside there for a while.

More recently a friend of mine has had a similar problem, but with home CD
players as well as car players. A CD that plays fine on his PC develops
noise and distortion and drop-outs after 20 to 30 minutes playing on other
people's home CD players. If the same CD is played the next day starting 20
minutes into the CD, the sound is fine. (Though sometimes the problem starts
immediately the first time.)

I have witnessed this with my friend's CDs on my own (late-model) home
DVD/CD player. This implies a heat problem more than using poor blank media,
though I don't really know if it's heat-related. Indeed, my friend has tried
many different types of brand name CDR blanks, and recently changed his CD
burner twice (3 different burners total), yet the problem persists. He has
also tried burning at slower speeds - from half each burner's rated speed
down to 4x with no success. His Windows computer is more than up to the
task, and his CD burners have all had buffer underrun protection which was
enabled in the two different burning programs he's tried.

Since he and I both have similar problems with playback becoming corrupted
over time while a CDR plays, I have to assume we're not alone. I can't even
imagine the cause since the CD format has a large amount of data redundancy.
Does this mean the data on playback is so hopelessly corrupted that each
player's error correction is running more or less constantly? What else
could cause this sort of very audible problem? Note that this is not a CDR
longevity issue, as the problem occurs with brand new CDRs only a day or two
after they're burned.

Also, is there any chance this is related to SCMS copy protection? My friend
has tried both CD Architect and Easy CD Creator. Easy CD Creator has no SCMS
option I can find, and he unchecked the Prot box in CD Architect. So I
assume that should prevent copy protection from being added.

Any insight will be most appreciated. Thanks.

--Ethan


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Relevant Pages

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