Fog in the slot

May 7th, 2006 - 9:46am

While driving to work this morning, I was listening to some music through the mp3 CD player in Justine’s car. I was listening to We Are Scientists when the player started skipping; the way it was skipping was quite interesting.

Instead of endlessly skipping a small section like with a broken CD, or jumping back a few seconds like with a scratched record, or even playing garbled sounds for a few seconds like with a damaged mp3, the disc was doing a combination of all three: it would jump backwards and forwards, play a few seconds and jump back, play a second and then jump forward. I let it go for around thirty seconds before I took the disc out of the player.

It was covered in condensation!

I’ve never seen this before, so excuse my apparent excitement in that previous comment. Almost the entire surface of the bottom of the disc was “foggy”, just like the car windows were this morning. Wiping the disc on my jeans while waiting at a red light, I put it back in and it played fine.

I’m not sure this is part of the normal operating environment for a CD player.

Tags: cd player, driving, ramblings, we are scientists, weird