Do CD-R's play on your player? If no, why not?

Some player reportedtly won't play CDRs that are burned at faster speeds. I had heard that the Levinson 39 would not play CDRs and therefore did not consider buying it. I took a CDR over to a friends who has 39 and it worked, the CD I used was burned at standard speed.

My Sony DVP-9000ES plays DVD's, CD's and SACD's, but it is does NOT playing CDR's. Interesting, since Sony is one of the major music distributors.

I'll try an audio CR-R and also a CD-RW. I've even bought a "production" CD-r (I assume) of the Buckingham Nicks album. It looks like a regular CD with orignial graphics on the cd and jewel case. All of them cause the PMDT to say "no disc" on the display. Its not even about whether they skip or not. Now realize that the PMDT is a DVD player as well, which might mean they use a different color laser or something like that.

Sometimes it is a reflectivity issue. CD-Rs are only 70% as reflective (on average, not sure where I got his number) as regular CDs. CD-RWs are even worse as they are only 30% as reflective as regular CDs. Some transport optics just can't deal with the lower reflectivity of the CD-R discs. And I doubt audio vs. computer CD-R stock would make ANY difference (assuming near identical media types) in being able to play them.

usually when I can't play a disc in some random PC CDROM or a audio cd player,

1. I try a slower buring speed like 4x or 2x, barring that
2. I try a different Brand of CD-R disc, barring that
3. I try different color CD-R discs.

I can usually get te disc to play by empirically figuring out which color substrate the particular player seems to prefer (probably a reflectivity issue).

See the following link for a discussion on CD-R substrate color:

http://arstechnica.infopop.net/OpenTopic/page?a=tpc&s=50009562&f=24609792&m=1240973441&r=7460961541#7460961541

Its not vodoo, it is design. The range of laser color used in DVD players will not read CD-Rs. If you burn music onto a CD-RW disk however, it should read (theheat sensitive ink dots are a different color. A few DVD players have two separate lasers and these are the only ones that read CD-Rs and DVDs. Within CD players, the reliability of CD-R reading is very variable. Often the error correction will simply declare a disk unreadable or part of a disk (causing skips). The basic design of the transport will determine how tolerant it is. The popular mid-fi Marantz units (modded into the Ah Tjobe as well are VERY poor at reading CD-Rs, for example). I use an ARCAM Alpha 7se as a transport because it reads almost all CD-Rs. Since manufacturers don't care about this per se, you really must try out a large assortment of CD-Rs (brands, music, data, etc.) on a unit before buying if this is important to you. DVD players are just not an option unless you burn everything yourself onto CD-RW disks which are more expensive than CD-Rs and somewhat less reliable in the long-term.