Well, reading your feedback, it sounds like I may have a bad drive. Could you take a listen for yourself and confirm? Rather than force you to rely on my poor description of the sound, I decided to record it (~180 KBytes) :
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/cfitz771/ ... s16kHz.mp3
I recorded the loading and reading of an audio disc. The beginning of the track is a couple of seconds of ambient noise - just the case fans. Then you can hear the tray closing and a few seconds of silence while the disc is recognized. Seven seconds into the track the disc begins to spin up and makes that terrible chattering sound I described earlier. It almost sounds like I have a rattlesnake in my drive. Yikes!
At this point the disc is still spinning at very slow audio playback rates (2x ~ 4x??), but it is making plenty of noise.
The nasty noises continue until the 20-second mark, and would continue indefinitely except that at the 20-second mark I started a CD quality check with Nero CD Speed. That forced the drive to speed up, and you can begin to hear the whine of the motor kicking in. At 25 seconds the reader reaches 16x and the nasty chattering suddenly stops, giving way to the expected whir of high rpm reading. I don’t object to this whir. It is quieter than my old AOpen CD-ROM, and it only occurs at top speed.
I then aborted the CD quality check, and the disc begins to spin down. You can hear a transition to a slower and quieter rpm at 45 seconds.
Finally, I hit the play button to play the CD audio, and the drive spins down all the way to its lowest speed. You can hear this occur at 52 seconds. At this point the drive is quiet as a mouse, with only a soft “chi - chi - chi” heard as it periodically reads the audio data (as I noted earlier, it reads audio CD’s faster than 1x).
For completeness I have also included a sample of a “normal” run without the horrible chattering:
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/cfitz771/ ... s16kHz.mp3
The normal run contains the same sequence of events as the bad run (albeit with slightly different timing) and uses the same CD.
So, what do you think? It obviously isn’t the CD, because sometimes it plays fine and sometimes it doesn’t. And I can eliminate the chattering at will by forcing the drive to spin up. But that isn’t a real solution.
Unless someone listens to the recording and says “A-Ha! I know what the problem is,” I think this drive will probably be going back for replacement.
cfitz
P.S. This is my first attempt at creating an MP3 file. It certainly is much smaller than the original wav file, but I was surprised that I couldn’t compress it even more. I thought that since I was just using a cheapo microphone connected to a cheapo sound card to record noise, I would be able to use the highest compression settings without significant degradation. But, surprisingly, even my leaden ears could readily detect the degradation at 24Kbps, and squeezing it further than that caused very audible distortion and loss of real information.
