CD-R in Prius

I had a tape of The Who's Tommy album recorded off my friend's LP. I accidentally bumped into the turntable during Acid Queen, but the 'mistake' wasn't bad. I had that tape for years until I lost it in college. Now that I hear Acid Queen correctly, it doesn't sound right.

I have to get my friend a preamp so his wife can hook up the turntable with magnetic pickups to the aux input of their shelf stereo. She has old LPs that she wants to play, but may not have gone to CDs.
She thought she was hooking it up wrong because she couldn't hear it play.

 

Dan:

You can still buy amps with Phono Preamp, but they're hard to find and $$$.

There are quite a few "classic" shops here in Winnipeg that have needles for 33 1/3, 78, and such. Also very high quality used turntables and amps.

What surprises me is the collection of young punks browsing the aisles of LP's and looking in wonder at a turntable. There is hope for the human race yet!

Jay

 

The Prius stereo also plays CD+R (which does not work on my antiquated home player).

 

I still have my Technics direct drive turn table, amplifier and double cassette deck. I later added a 5-CD player. Never bought the tuner as I don't listen to radio except in the car.

Still have my vinyl. I have plenty of records that have not been and probably never will be released in CD.

My mother has some old wax 78's. Same size as a record but one song per side.

While I haven't done it I do have the equipment to digitize and import my vinyl to iTunes and then burn it. I think if I ever go this route, I'd want to get some software to clean up the pops and scratches. I see it being very labor intensive. Maybe a project better left to my retirement.

 

[font=Comic Sans MS:245e5a2f14]There's something really magical about listening to June Christy while cruising down the highway. It's not that complicated or labor intensive to transcribe your vinyl to digital. The software I use cleans up the sound without intervention.

Just be sure you get a pre-amp with "Phono" inputs. The RIAA prescribed and enforced a frequency response curve for almost all vinyl recordings. If you don't use this "Phono" response curve, your records will most likely sound way too treble and the scratchyness will be unbearable, from experience.

BTW, I just checked and there are six June Christy albums on iTunes. You never know where digital versions of your old records may turn up! Of course, you still have to burn them to CD... or get the iPod attachment.[/font:245e5a2f14]

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(jayman\";p=\"96429)</div>

I found a source on the web for like $40 using Google.

 

I put (5) cd's in my prius cd changer, a mix of CD-R and I think
a CD-RW or two. 2 days later I got a cd error on disc 5. Won't
play, eject, etc. Took it to the Toyota dealership this morning
and they ordered a new stereo system, no cost, as my car is
3 months old. I think one or two of the cds had labels on them,
but I was careful to make sure they were on completely, without
airbubbles. I do live in Arizona though, and with the temps now,
it may have been a lifted label.

If they tell me the cause, I will post it here.

tiffky

 

Next time, avoid the CD-RW. I find they are most likely to flummox the machinery.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Godiva\";p=\"99726)</div>

I hate to get picky, but technically it's more likely to *befuddle* the machinery.

 

I hate to get picky here, but cdrw has little to do with it since the Prius supports and plays either equally well. And it's most likely label issue here.

cdrws should be no more sensitive to heat in our cdplayer oven than cdrs. Dependng on how cheap the brand's dye is, cdrs will die (heh) quicker too - adding to the plastic in the land fills.

cdrws have the advantage of reburn fixes any strange skipping issues.

 

Even if a CD-RW itself did go bad (say enough heat shifted the liquid crystal state), it simply wouldn't play. It still would eject, unless the plastic warped, but that can happen to commercially pressed CDs.

 

I guess I'm one of the unlucky ones with regard to playing CD-R's. This has been killing me. I have the JBL system. Regular CD's play fine but my CD player seems to have trouble with the CD-R's. Every so often there are skips or static.
I have tried a couple of things with varying degrees of success but none perfect. I have tried three different brands of CD-R's. I had some old TDK's which surprisingly had the least amount of glitches in the car player. I also have those Verbatim 45-look ones--newer but not as good. After wasting several of those, I researched online and it seemed that everyone was raving about these Taiyo Yuden brand of CD-R's. I got those and they were no better than the Verbatim. Next, I bought a new DVD/CD burner, the newest Plextor Dual-Layer one with all kinds of tools for tweaking the burning process. Made a lot of "coasters" but no clean playing CD's. I've finally decided that it must be the Prius CD player--all of these discs I've burned played flawlessly on my computer and in my old Dodge's (1995) CD player. Like I say I'm unlucky and got one of the marginally acceptable players. Toyota was smart to cover themselves with that disclaimer but it certainly doesn't make me happy.

I got the JBL upgrade system because I love my music. Big disappointment. Just about the only thing I like about the audio system is the steering wheel controls.

 

OK, a bunch of things in no particular order...

My Prius plays CD-RWs and CD-Rs with no problem, as long as they're audio CD format. Computer blank CDs are fine.

If your Prius won't play Taiyo Yuden or Verbatim Blue Azo discs, you're out of luck. Chances are JBL varies the drive mechanisms they use according to what's cheapest at any given moment, and you were unlucky enough to get one that wasn't specced to read CD-Rs. Since Toyota don't advertise it as able to read CD-Rs, it's not technically a fault and they won't fix it.

For what it's worth, there is no official standard for CD-RWs, and they don't comply with the standards for CDs. So they may or may not work, it's down to chance. CD-Rs are a safer bet.

Also, CD-Rs offering more than 74 minutes/650MB capacity don't comply with the CD standards either, so there's no guarantee they'll be readable. Again, sticking with standard CD-Rs is your best bet.

Verbatim Blue Azo are a good choice because they're (a) available cheaply, and (B) use a stable dye that won't fade when left in the car. Failing that, my experience is that TDK media are very reliable. I've been using TDK *everything* for over 20 years, and I've only ever had 1 media failure. (That was a metal cassette tape back in the 1980s, which had a big dropout. It was the earliest days of metal tape manufacturing. TDK replaced it for free.)

Music CD-Rs are slightly different than computer ones--they have a flag set to say "this is a music CD", but the format is otherwise identical. Home hi-fi CD recorders are usually crippled to only record on Music CD-Rs. As someone else rightly points out, this is simply a scam to try and keep the music industry in nose candy.

 

Got my CD's back today. Dealer put a new stereo in
and it took about 1 hour. It was a label issue, not a
CD-R or CD-RW issue. So I put one of my CD-R's in
and played it all day without any issues. I was glad
that they replaced it for free even though the manual
warns agains using CD-R and CD-RW which is what I
had in there. It was a particularly hot day as I recall
when the cd jammed.

 

Something I haven't seen mentioned...

To reduce the number of skips/glitches in your CD-R media, have your computer burn the disc at a SLOWER speed. Burning at 4x often causes fewer errors than the 20x or higher burn speeds. For one, you're less likely to get a buffer underflow, and while many burners can "wait and recover" from that error now, there's still often a "gap" where the error occurred. Some players handle these gaps better than others, and consumer audio CD players usually handle them the worst.

 

excellent point, wrprice.

I copy my CD-Rs @ 8x (will save ya perhaps 5 minutes per CD vs 4x) and have had absolutely no skipping or error issues whatsoever, during playback on my non-JBL factory unit.

Maybe someone (or me one of these days) can do a full spread test and see at which speed the burned copy faults..

Cheers~

 

It's kind of funny actually. I'm gradually burning a number of my favorite cds for the car and am using up and old spindle of rather generic CDs I purchased a number of years ago. Most of the burns are successful, however longer play CDs, those approaching 80 minutes are not nearly as successful at copying. I'll be glad to get that old spindle gone and move over to newer 80 minute discs.

Anyway, I have found that the JBL changer is sometimes a little finicky about switching disks at the end of a burnt disc. Most of the time it will switch discs just fine, but sometimes it will just hang at the end of a disc and require that I actually select the next disc to play. I haven't figured out any pattern because it doesn't exhibit this activity on every disc.

 

after my husband having his car broken into 3 times and the most valuable thing ever stolen was his cd case (which was hidden in the dash and its the only thing they took for 500 dollars in damage) i would never put originals in my car, its too much money to replace, and its really nice to be able to keep all your cds in one place. my husband and i are huge music people and we both had over 1000 cds each, and while we had a lot of duplicates, thankfully since his cds were stolen, we don't want to risk losing another 20 or 30