CD player vibration from CD's

I recieved this answer from a tech that has worked on my stuff.

You're right the Oppo drive does vibrate a lot and it's normal. The Oppo drive spins the disc 200x faster then the Ikemi did. The older style plain CD drives were not high speed computer ROM drives with no RAM buffer memory stage to totally eliminate jitter. With dedicated CD players, jitter can be off the charts if the cd was cut out of round or vibrates alot. With a blu ray player, the data is stored and updated into a FIFO RAM buffer many times a second. No data goes out to the rest of the player until it is jitter and error free. Vibration and out of round or scratches do not affect the high speed re-reading ROM drive type players.

hi Leatherneck:
I have a nice Oppo BDP-83SE, and I have also found this to be true... most discs play fine (smooth, quiet, and vibration-free when I hold the cabinet)... however, some (quite a few) discs cause vibration, mainly those from the library or rentals, and I have pretty well confirmed that they cause vibration because they are a wee bit unbalanced in the horizontal plane(not warped), due to the stickers, barcodes, clear lamination, etc. that are sometime stuck ontop of these discs... I've proven this by taking a "good" CD, sticking a short piece of masking tape off to one side (to create a small imbalance), and then playing it... sure, enough, I start to a get a vibration right away... adding more tape makes it worse, removing the tape removes the problem... Oppo is willing to take in my unit (at my ship cost + hassle and risk of ship damage...), HOWEVER, if this is a problem inherent to *all* 83s or 83SEs, then they won't actually be able to fix or change anything, and it will be a big waste of time... Q: what ended up happening with your unit?... did you send it back and get it fixed or ???... can anyone else comment, or better still, try the masking tape test and report back with your findings here?.. thank you!

I agree the culprit is much more likely to be unbalanced vs. not flat. The principle is no different from what you face with car tires. Which begs the question of could there be such a service as a "CD balancing " service" and would it be practical.

That's one of the things that the Audio Desk CD lathe does. I do both sides which trues and balances the CD.

Chuck

An excellent example of why it's so important to obtain true level of the CD transport, which, as fate would have it, cannot necessarily be obtained by sticking a level on top of the CD player due to tolerances of manufacture. A non-level transport just exacerbates any tendency of the disc to wobble or flutter.