CDR Reading Issue

Guys,
I'm after some advice.
My girl has had some demo CD's pressed by a company for her band. However they don't play on my Musical Fidelity XRay. We got 1 or 2 to register (out of 100) but they were very slow to read. The CD's have a blue dye which I thought was unusual, but the guy who did the pressing assures Me they are quality audio standard discs. He is also an old friend so I don't think he's pulling a fast one. He mentioned he knows of one other instance with a German CD player with this issue but that's it.

Is my Xray really just extremely fussy? We tried the discs in the car and on a cheap old Sony player and they played fine.

 

Hi,

I've got some CDRs with the blue dye and they seem fine on most new-ish drives but won't play on an older (90s) Meridian CD player. Very likely the X-Ray drive is just fussy or perhaps the laser tracking is slightly out of spec and the blue discs push it over the line.

 

I've a Cyrus CD7 that also has problems with a few CD-Rs, despite not being all that old. I think sometimes the pursuit of perfect data reading in real time gives a very fussy player.

Do try giving the laser lens a clean with some meths and a cotton bud though, and also put a bit of sillicon greese on the mech cogs. This recently got my car CD player back in action from being very fussy.

 

There's not much you can do about this - and no, it's not your MF X-ray. The blue colour strongly suggests these are CDRs burnt, rather than pressed discs - nothing wrong with that of course (I have similar demos in my collection)

But the Azo dye used on such CDRs is less reflective than redbook standard and may well cause healthy 'CD-only' player lasers to struggle to find focus and so play correctly.

It totally depends on the laser mech used; some mechs inherently cope better with low reflectivity or grubby dics (esp, peculiarly, early Philips - CDMs1,2,4 and 9 can be superb for this, whereas Philips CDM12.1 aka VAM1201/1202 etc used in many Marantz products struggles ... and will not read even 'normal' CD-Rs). Some later CD/DVD laser mechs allegedly have the ability to ramp laser power up a tad to help ensure a clean 'read'.

 

Sorry for the slow comeback on this and thank you for the replies. We got them printed to some silver discs in the end and they've been fine.

Interestingly I scoured my collection after this and found a couple of dodgy band CD's burned onto Blue Ink discs and they worked fine. I even found one on a black disc (like a Playstation) and that worked as well. Odd.