[ARSCLIST] CD mystery of the day

[Tom Fine <tflists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Here's my story, and I'm sticking to it ...

Bought a used CD. Got it back home to play it. Looked at the surface and, oh darn (language scrubbed 
for G rating) it's got a serious gash in it. Small but deep. More horizontal than vertical, exactly 
the kind of thing guaranteed to skip a player. Won't play in any player in the house, or the Plextor 
computer drive. The gash screws up 2 tracks on the disc, causing skips and pauses while the player 
re-finds its place.

So I think I'll grab the two effected tracks into Soundforge using the Extract Track from CD command 
and see if there are fudge-fixable glitches. The first track, which had 6 specific pause/skips reads 
right in at high speed and ... no audible glitches in the WAV file. No pauses or spikes in the 
waveform. Huh?? OK, read in next track. It reads in quickly at high speed and ... only one spike of 
0.011 second, easily just deleted from the file with nothing audible to my ears. No other spikes, 
pauses or glitches in the WAV file.

So the question -- why could the Plextor drive recover all but 0.011 second correctly when 
transferring data at high speed but couldn't play the tracks at real-time CD speed? Does it have to 
do with how the laser aligns or focuses?

BTW, my solution was to extract all the tracks, save them as WAV files and burn a new CD on a nice 
clean TY blue-dye blank. The CD was so close to the original that cddb/Gracenote found it correctly 
and populated the disc and song titles perfectly in Windows Media Player and iTunes software.

-- Tom Fine