"It's Alive!"

Last September, I bought my first CD deck since the early 2000s. I followed that up by replacing about a dozen of the couple hundred CDs that had disappeared in the aftermath of the fire two and a half years ago. Everything was fine for a while, but then one day several of the disks started skipping or just flat out refused to play. Disheartened, and deciding it wasn't worth my time or frustration to try and get them playing (there was nothing physically wrong with any of the disks and they played fine in my Mac), I removed the deck from my system and packed it up.

After stumbling across a YouTube video this morning about how to fix wonky CD players, I decided to give it a go. And wouldn't you know…it worked! I put on the CD that was the worst offender (Pet Shop Boys: Very/Relentless) and both disks played from beginning to end without a single hiccup.

So what did I do to pull to fix it? I got some isopropyl alcohol, cotton swabs, and wiped down the laser lens and the rails on which the laser sled rides. There was a small bit of gunk on one of the rails, and that was apparently all it took to throw things off.