kxap...

Yep... Your's is starting on the same trail mine went down. If it continues like mine, it will start rejecting regular CDs. I rarely ever fight the CD player anymore... When I do, it takes up to 20 minutes to get it working... or me to give up. It drives me insane!! I guess it is time for a true CD-R capable head unit... or the iPod as I mentioned before.

 

sucks about your guys headunits not playing CDs. The one thing I could suggest is putting in a laser cleaner. Go to any electronics store and you should be able to pick one up, it is essentially a CD with a brush mounted on it for cleaning the laser inside the CD player. Perhaps some dust or dirt got in it and is disturbing the laser pick-up. Just a thought. Sorry to hear your guys stock unit is crapping out on you.

 

belive it or not....those things do work....I had a buddies computer I was ATTEMPTING to get running again and the damn cdrom kept screwing up....I kept getting all sorts of error messages when attempting to install different programs....his wife had a CD cleaner as described above for her regular cd player....I gave it shot and presto chango....the thing worked like a champ after that.....they are pretty cheap...and more than worth it if it saves you the aggravation of your HU not working like you would like it to.

 

Thanks for the advice. Unfortunately, I have already tried that twice. I had a thought though. In the 3.5 years I have had the car, the battery has never been disconnected or died. I know people have had problems with the CD player not ejecting CDs and a power reset has solved that. Perhaps it will help...

 

my brother has a 972U in his Suby, and I really like it. I don't know how it compares to other brands in sound quality, I'm not real good at that. If you don't want to pay as much for the display, try a 572U, although I like the display on the 972U a lot (well not all those stupid graphics)

I think you'll generally be pleased with it, especially since it has a nice big volume ****

 

Well I finally had the time today to do an analysis of why my stock HU wouldnt play cd-r's and I came up with this conclusion. It's all about the media!

Circuit city CD-R: wouldnt play at all though in the past it did play occasionally (see posts above)
FujiFilm CD-R: wouldnt play...played in the past occasionally..

Verbatim CD-R: PLAYS consistently! DAAAAMN I'm so excited now! I have to get me some of those azo blue dye discs.. they are the only ones that work each time I pop them in the CD-R.

Just thought I'd let you guys know in case anyone else has some problems.

 

I should have mentioned something about this before, but in All headunits, especially factory ones, media matters. In my previous Kenwood deck, it wouldn't play Prime Peripherals media, and a few other generics.

For my money, TDK is the best media you can buy, it has worked in everything I have tried to play it, except a few older DVD players. For those of you who have Costco memberships, it's also available there at a substantial savings. I don't use anything but these days.