XA52P skips on playback; advice, please?

[swsnyder]

My wife has a XA52P that occasionally skips/pauses on playback of audio CDs. I'm trying to determine the reason for this.

The XA52P is attached to the intrinsic SATA controller of the i875P chipset on her Asus PC-DL motherboard. The motherboard has the latest BIOS, and MSI has not released updated firmware for the XA52P. The machine is running a fully-updated copy of WinXP/SP2.

All that said, I don't think that there is a problem with the drive itself or with the ability to read from it. Why? Because no problems are seen when ripping audio tracks. Possibly retries are being done when ripping, which would mask read errors, but I've seen no evidence of it.

Maybe it's not the CD drive, but the audio? Could be, but no skips or pauses are heard when playing streaming audio or playing audios file directly from the hard disk.

Can anyone advise me on further debugging of this problem?

Thanks.

http://www.msi.com.tw/program/products/optical_devices/dvs/pro_dvs_detail.php?UID=568
http://www.asus.com/products4.aspx?l1=9&l2=39&l3=99&model=104&modelmenu=1

[Ian]

Are these pressed (store bought) audio CD's or copies?

[swsnyder]

Are these pressed (store bought) audio CD's or copies?

Both.

[Ian]

It could be a number of things.

1. Scratched or dirty discs

2. Poor writing quality if its a CD-R disc

3. Dirty or worn out laser on the drive.

If the pressed discs aren't scratched or dirty and they play fine on other drives, its probably the XA52P.

[hoxlund]

i got rid of that drive very fast, not very impressed with it