Question Intermittent Strong Buzz Coming From My ASUS Zen Drive Player

[Wolkie 72]

Hi Folks

Just a short question. I am ripping my cd collection to WMP on Windows 11, and while some of the cd's run quietly through the rip, others make it sound louder, as if it was going into "low gear". Given that description, is there something I need to do to fix this or do I just leave it alone?

Thanks as always for helping this old "Geezer" out! I don't know what I'd do without Tom's!

 

[Paperdoc]

Is this sound intermittent, or continuous? I'm thinking if it is intermittent your CD's may be old enough to have a few spots that are hard to read cleanly. OR, your optical drive may have a slightly dirty read head. In either case, any read error automatically causes a particular action to recover from the error. The drive will stop reading, retract the read head to its parking space location, then move the head back to where it was and try the read again. If that succeeds it will simply continue its work. This form of recovery from a Read Error actually is done entirely within the optical drive, and it does NOT report an actual error to Windows, so you get no error message. The extra noise you hear may be the two strokes of the read head arm moving back to Park, and returning to the track it is trying to read.

IF you can and want to, you could try running an optical drive head cleaner on your unit, then leaving it open for a little while to ensure any cleaning solvent had evaporated out before using it again.

 

[Wolkie 72]

Hi, Paperdoc

Poor choice of words on my part, please accept my apology, sir. I should have said "infrequent", as it does not always produce a hum. I will try the cleaner method to see. I do get an "incomplete rip" message periodically (that is not on *all* cd's), but when I play the cd back, there is no problem - all tracks are there.

Thanks for your time and assistsance!

 

[Paperdoc]

You're welcome, and good luck!