Spins Too Fast When Playing Some CDs

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Level 1

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Spins Too Fast When Playing Some CDs

My optical drive makes a loud whirring noise when playing shiny looking CDs but runs much quieter with duller labels (no mirror finish). I checked this out at the Apple Store near me and the display MacBook Pro does the same thing as mine. I demonstrated it at the genius bar and it was confirmed. Please don't suggest I copy all my shiny CDs to my hard drive or compress the sound so my optical drive needn't matter. I'm hoping other people will post with the same problem and possibly get a firmware update.

MacBook Pro 15, Mac OS X (10.5.2)

Posted on Mar 24, 2008 2:29 PM

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Answer 1

bdkjones

Level 4

1,335 points

Mar 24, 2008 2:50 PM in response to George Rose

No, this is normal behavior.

The optical drive will spin as fast as it can with each CD. Some disks, due to a myriad of factors, can't spin as fast as others. Usually this difference is most noticeable with home-burned CDs/DVDs versus professional, commercially-burned CDs/DVDs. The faster the disk spins, the faster data gets read and written to it.

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Answer 2

George Rose Author

Level 1

0 points

Mar 24, 2008 5:34 PM in response to bdkjones

I know this doesn't have to be "normal behavior" based on the performance of my two HP computers. Also the Cds in question are all commercial except one was a copy and it ran quiet. I used only ten samples. Maybe it's due to a different optical drive vendor for HP. Whatever. I guess I'd better have a set of headphones handy for the Mac but sometimes someone else likes to take a listen at the same time.

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