DON’T AUTOMATICALLY THROW OUT THAT CD!
There are a number of situations that might arise when a CD doesn’t play, and as counterintuitive as it might seem, it almost NEVER means you should throw out your CD. I’ll take these situations one at a time.
BROKEN OR DEFECTIVE CD PLAYER
Let’s say you have a store bought CD that doesn’t play or that skips.
There are a number of possibilities here about what might be the problem. First off, it might be that it’s the CD player that’s broken, not your CD. But, you say, how is that possible if I can play other CDs?
Well, here’s a dirty little secret. Contrary to industry propaganda, store bought CDs degrade over time. In fact, if you buy a used CD and it plays perfectly, the CD itself is most likely not actually perfect. There are probably errors on it. Then how come it plays perfectly? Because your CD player peforms error correction on the CD. It interpolates the data on either side of the data that is corrupted or missing. Basically, it guesses what the missing data should be and supplies it.
But what happens if the chip in your CD player that perfoms error correction starts to go bad? What happens is that your CD player can no longer perform error correction on your CDs as effectively as before. The CDs with a lot of errors on them start skipping or you can’t play them at all.
