I own a CD5 that I'm really happy with when playing red book CDs but when I tried to play CD-Rs on it, it would not find the latter tracks. The first four or five tracks would play fine but it would give me the Err message if I tried to access any other track. Once a track was playing, if I let it play, it would keep on playing the whole disc without any problems.

I tried several CD burners/write speed/makes of blanks/computers to try to solve the problem but always got the same result. That was until I recently purchased a DVD burner. Just for fun, I tried burning a CD-R on it to see how it would react in my CD5. To my surprise, it played fine and I could access any track I wanted. I have since then burned about 15 CD-Rs that all pay flawlessly. Their sound is even as good as a redbook CDs.

But why does this work ?

I have a theory to explain why but it may be completely off the track, so if anyone with knowledge of discs formats could correct me I would appreciate.

Here goes : Thinking about the DVD burner, I figured that because it is able to write 6 times more information on a DVD-R than on a CD-R (which is the same diameter) the actual data tracks on the disc itself are probably spaced much closer to one another. If this is so, the positioning of the burning head needs to be a lot more precise. Because of this additional precision, the data tracks on a CD-R burned with a DVD burner should be located on the disc with much higher accuracy than when using a CD burner.

Lets suppose also that naim CD players use a laser beam that is very narrow so that they read only one data track on the disc and are not influenced by neighbouring tracks. If this is the case, they would have more difficulty finding a data track that is not located exactly where it should be, hence the Err message on all CD-Rs except the more precise ones from a DVD burner

I don't even know if this makes any sense or if even my solution would work for anybody else but one thing I am certain of : I am now completely happy with my CD5, especially since the addition of a flatcap2

Hope this helps someone else with the same problem

Eric