system gets contaminated by dust in all places and thats the thing. The all drives need to be cleaned. So open all screws.
Mechanics should not wobble or have any contamination between the spindle holder.
Dust and other contamination at optics - the sensor array under lens gets dust inside, thats the trouble, however can be tried with compressed air for a moment). Thats the thing very difficult to get access in but there is a very very little chance to clean it.
The dust enters into the drive becouse the computer closed cases suck in the air from all possible micro holes and those are the drive ones too around buttons, (volume regulator!). Worse if it has a fan (PXW4220Ti).
First clean the lens with a soft painter brush (gently, couple times would suffice).
Next, the lens cleaning with 99.8% isopropanol with a wet cotton sponge. It makes sense however you do not see with a naked eye.
That should suffice at first and lets try with different discs, including some pressed audio discs (shorter than 60min). If not enough to read CD-R then the next steps:
Then the laser output adjustment. It has some tolerances, so you wont burn it up in first place. The safe enough is to turn it little bit -- first mark the position of origin with a marker then turn just a 10 degrees clockwise at first and then little bit more if needed as a last resort.
That way the old CD players are cured too (the Technics SL-PG 490 and 590 audio players with the following trickery succeeded to get the capability to play the CD-RW discs while they do not support officially. ).
From the Estonian History Archives archiving guidelines:
The CD burning at the lower speeds makes sense, but in a sense if it has its optics clean, suitable recording media.
(Otherwise the newer drive at 4x speed makes the better result than old contaminated drive at 1x speed!).
The high-speed drives which can handle CD-R recording with speeds 8x-40x, at the lowest speed as 8x might still go out of calibration, so it should be something between with those drives. While it does not hurt to check the CD-R is clean before recording (just like cleaning before CD-audio ripping).
After each CD-R writing let the drive to have couple minutes pause to cool.
The factory who really made the discs can be read out on the burnimg and cdrecord programs. Also it shows if it is a long or short strategy medium.
There is also option to use the drives which have the Audio Master option in their features, and to use such option when recording
data CD instead. Some drives support it. It result by using 10..15% larger gaps, (the 74min CD would last 68min, 80min CD will be as 72min and so on). thus improving signal-to-noise ration in laser pick-up optics.
Still to get best out of it, then to select the blank-CDs for best reflection ratio it really needs the oscilloscope hooked on the laser pick-up optics array signals to get some useful info what the drive is best suited in order to see how much sharp are the signals on the receiver... 😉
Current project: DOS ISA soundcard with 24bit/96Khz digital I/O, SB16 compatible switchable.
newly made SB-clone ...with 24bit and AES/EBU... join in development!