We have just bought a Sony CMT-X5CDB all-in-one HiFi unit.

It suits us very well, but most (not all) CDs stop playing at 18 mins.

I phoned Sony support who had me do a factory reset, but it was the same. They said to return it if the problem persisted which it did.

I returned it to Amazon and received a replacement....which is doing exactly the same!

What could we be doing wrong? Our CDs are all quite old hi quality classical in good condition....do CDs vary in any respect?

Reviews about the CD player (not the DAB) are mostly positive with no mention of problems like this.

Any advice most welcome?

Firstly breath on the discs and wipe them gently with a soft tissue from the centre outwards. If that doesn't work get your money back, Sony are usually a very reliable firm but anyone can have a bad batch. I assume the discs are normal commercial, as opposed to home made, ones and work on other players, you could try a DVD player if you haven't got access to another CD player.

Thanks. We have tried cleaning one disk which made no difference.

You mean bad batch as in two machines from same batch? Guess it could happen. Maybe get the third one from a different source.

At the moment we are plugging through a number of CDs picked at random from the shelf to see if we can see a pattern...old vs new, pop vs classical. Score is 50% bad so far with all the bad ones being old classical. All are commercial not home made, and all play OK in a cheap old ghettoblaster, and in a computer DVD drive.

Yeah; if they play alright on 2 other machines, then its a faulty batch your new stereo must be from. Its not the discs, obviously.

Thanks.

We had pretty much decided to return it, but thought we would try playing a few more discs to see any pattern.

The next fourteen discs have all played OK....just the two that we started with failing so far.

Tried playing one of those two again, and it failed again at the same point. That disc plays OK in another machine.

Now somewhat torn about returning since it now looks like there is a disc element to the problem. It looks as if it is fussy about CDs.

OTOH, 2 out of 16 is 12%.......not good if our new CD player won't play 12% of our large CD collection.

I have been using CDs for over twenty years, all my discs, including slightly scuffed ones from charity shops, play without any problems. The fact that they play for eighteen minutes gives the impression the discs aren't clamped properly in the drive and are wobbling slightly as a result as they play. CDs play from the inside out so the errors get worse as you reach the outer tracks. Greasy deposits around the centre hole can also cause problems.

Thanks again.

We are returning the second one to Amazon, and have ordered a third one on-line from another supplier. This other supplier is also a reasonably local hifi shop and I have been on the phone to them and explained the whole situation. In a very helpful conversation he said that if this one has the same problem to take it and the CDs that won't play into the showroom, and they will investigate and test the CDs in other players.

One possibly relevant comment he made was that more expensive better CD players tend to be more fussy about CDs. Cheaper CD players and computer CD/DVD drives are more tolerant. We have only be using an inferior and old CD player, and computer ones so far.

We might have to be prepared to rip the ones that won't play and play them by bluetooth from iPhone/iPad.

Or we might as you say have had two from a bad batch and the third will be fine.

Historically the two 'creators' of CD (Philips and Sony) had totally different ideas about what they were for. Philips built theirs on the basis of 'playability', and sacrificed audio quality - Sony built theirs for audio quality, and sacrificed playability instead.

So Philips units would play pretty well anything, but didn't have the audio quality of Sony units. Perhaps older members might remember the Philips adverts where they spread jam on a CD?