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Why do CDs skip?


Audio Flynn

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Isolation techiques !!

My cd player is sitting about 3 feet from the side grille of my k'horn.

use to skip all the time when i cranked the volume.

CD player now sits on " black diamond racing cones " which sit on top of " black diamond racing THOSE THINGS platforms " .

have not skipped a CD or DVD in the last 3 years , since purchasing these .

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Some skip because of poor or non existent error correction (on scratched cd's). Gamut cdp, for instance, doesn't use any error correction. Their head designer think that it spoils the sound of the players, and that poorly maintained cd's are not supposed to be played in it.

Other reason is that the laser is weak and need alignment, but that is not a good sign.

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Any more on this? I have a (what I thought was ) nice Nakamichi MB-1s CD player. I bought summer before last, it was NOS. It's great in the HT cabinet, holds 7 CD's, nice remote, all that. It has a Nak custom 20-bit DAC internal and actually sounds pretty good. Now, it skips some, usually in the second or third track, sometimes later. It skips on CD's that other players don't have trouble with. I took it apart once, nothing to see except a lot of complex mechanisms. I'd love to save this thing, anybody got any bright ideas? I guess techs don't like to work on these, or there's trouble getting parts or something.

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I've found that the motors that carry the laser are often the biggest sources for skipping. I've had CD players that worked better on their side than sitting normally...I always figured it had to do with the gear lag in the motor.

It also wouldn't hurt to try and clean the lense on a CD player just in case there's dust or some other similar item.

In regards to error correction, every CD uses the Red Book audio format which has error correction built into the very way the data is stored on a CD. every cd player then must do "error correction" or else it won't play. at the same time though, I'm sure there's probably different ways of doing this (in front of the DAC).

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The tracking mechanism seems to wear out pretty often, even on the best transports. The dirty little secret offered by a tech on AA - revealed that there are only a couple different kinds of these tracking mechanisms even on transports costing thousands of dollars! The first ones produced seemed to be more reliable.

When mine started skipping, I researched getting an upscale transport until I talked to above mentioned tech. He advised just getting mine fixed for a couple hundred every 5 years or so.

That's what I did! - I had the tracking mechanism replaced.

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