When I got my new old Yamaha CD player back in December, I was kind of disappointed to discover it didn’t like playing CDs over 74 minutes in length (the original CD standard) or CDRs of any length.
I wrote it off due to the vintage of the machine. Built in 1990, 80-minute CDs were just starting to show up, and CDRs were still a couple years away. Yamaha can be forgiven, I kept telling myself.
But it nagged me, y’know?
So the other day I pulled out the stack of CDRs I’d burned prior to my MiniDisc obsession to take with me to work. I tried playing one (a different one than I’d tried initially when I got the CD player) and wouldn’t you know…it read the table of contents and played just fine. I threw in another. And another. And yet another—and they all played just fine. It was only that one particular disc that I’d initially tried that had issues.
It was more an experiment than anything else, because I don’t have anything on CDR that I don’t have an original CD copy of—with the exception of that one disc that wouldn’t play (a mix CD sent to me by a friend several years ago).
All this got me thinking about the commercial 80-minute CD issue this afternoon. I don’t have that many; in fact, they’re all from the Euphoria house/dance music series. I threw the original disk I’d tried back in the player, and yeah, it still lost its mind somewhere around track 14 (which pushed it past the 74-minute mark). The same thing happened with Disc 2 from that particular release.
But then I tried a different release: Ibiza Euphoria And wouldn’t you know, both CDs in the set played perfectly from beginning to end. I tried another Euphoria recording, and yup…played perfectly. So it wasn’t the player at all; it was just that particular release and it affected both discs in the set. Factory pressing issue? Who knows.
All I know is that I’m relieved that it’s not hardware, but in this case, the software is what’s at fault.