When Cds Need A Dust-buster
Sydney Morning Herald
Sunday June 16, 1996
KEEP your CDs clean if you want them to play properly. That goes for loose lint and dust, greasy fingerprints and the fine spray you get when opening drink cans and bottles.
But the laser pickup inside the player is also an important part - if not the most important part - of the player's optical system.
The laser pickup in most CD players and CD-ROM drives is usually tucked away inside the player. Safe and sound, you say?
The truth is that in most CD players and CD-ROM drives, the discs are inserted for playing with the shiny, playing side facing down. That means the pickup is pointing upwards, where dust may settle on the lens and in time reduce the intensity of the laser beam that reads the disc. In fact, the beam must pass twice through the lens - first on the way out onto the music track on the disc, then back in again through the same lens onto a light-sensitive pickup.
Telltale signs around the player include dust and lint deposits on the CD tray, especially in computer CD-ROM drives where airborne debris enters the disc-loading compartment, drawn in by the cooling fan in the computer's power supply.
Even in portable CD players where the pickup is accessible, you should never touch the lens assembly, which has a delicate suspension system and is easily damaged.
One way to help avoid the dust problem is to use a laser lens cleaner such as the High Performance Compact Disc Laser Lens Cleaner by Musicway. It is a compact disc with six small cleaning tufts attached to the playing surface on tracks two, three and four.
Musicway says the six brushes on the nine-track CD are strategically aligned so that they do not cause prolonged repetitive dropouts that might trigger the player's error detection system to shut the player down - as may occur with a faulty CD, for example.
The Musicway lens-cleaning disc also has additional test tracks for left and right stereo channel identification and balance checks, plus signals for correctly phasing stereo loudspeakers, and digital sound effects for system evaluation.
Musicway suggests using the lens cleaner about every eight to 10 hours of playing time. Retail price is about $19.95. Details, Musicway Corporation Ltd on (03) 9558 9666.
© 1996 Sydney Morning Herald