DVD s reading CD-R s and CD-RW s

I have been told that it is an issue of DVD's being more "shiny" and therefore requiring a weaker (or somehow different) laser to read them. CDR's and CDRW's are a lot less shiny (just have a look) and, therefore, the DVD-grade lasers often have trouble reading them. Some of the higher end DVD players will then include a dual laser design in order to have seperate lasers optimized for reading the different formats. I do not know for a fact, but I imagine that some of the players that sporadically can read some disks and not others use a DVD laser that is tweaked to somehow be more sensitive to less reflective formats. Check to see whether a particular model includes a dual laser and is designed to read all formats in question. If not, its ability to read CDR's may be hit or miss on a disk by disk basis. I have a Pioneer Elite DV-37 that is described by Pioneer as using a "Twin-Wave Laser Pickup for CD / Video CD / CD-R / CD-RW playback." I think this incorporates what I'm trying to describe. Truth be told, however, I haven't even tried a CDR in it yet as I listen to music on a seperate player. Guess I'll try it out when I get home.

Kthomas, what media are you using? My Sony 7700 reads some media, but not others. On some media, it won't manually advance directly to a middle index point without going into some sort of grand mal seizure.

My Pioneer DV525 has read all brands of CDR's fed it. I have not tried CDRW's. It did pop a bit on a computer generated CD, though. I should admit they were burned on Pioneer machines, as well.

My Pioneer reads CD R only. Read CDV, DVD, VCD and CDs, no CD RW though