Phild, that's a great diagnosis, are you a doctor? In 1988 at a frat party my date spilled a beer on a rack of my cd's including this one, the paper inserts to this day are moldy its not that gross). Of course a cd this old is gonna have some scratches, so I cleaned the CD and now it skips on track 1. However, it still has the problems with upsampling, and this is on every track, across the whole disk, on both disks. So either the CD is going bad or there is something else. I have older CD's that were also slimed but which are unaffected. Anyone else?