Skipping CD's

Sean, that hurts: reduced mental capacity as one ages? Well you did say "way up in years" so I will simply consider that I have not yet reached this stage. Aside from that, I will have to chalk up another great answer to your credit. Regards.

Yes, the laser can become out of alignment and not perform as well. In many ways like a poorly aligned turntable cartridge.
It can also go bad, but so does everything else.

In some ways I guess we might be somewhat guilty of having a plug and play mentality with CD's. We spend hours aligning and issolating our vinyl rig to perfection; but then throw a CD player on the rack without a care, and then wonder why it does not perform near as well.

I agree with Sean totally. Love or hate Linn, their CDP's are as reliable as you can buy. I only have one observation that I would like to share with everyone. I burn CD's to play in my truck and have found the most generic, plain, non-labeled disks to be great. I'm not talking about sonics, just playability and the frequency of burning coasters. After 9-11 there were disk companies selling premium priced CDR's with heavy graphics and I bought two batches since the proceeds were going to the 9-11 victim families. I had no problems burning them but they didn't play well in my Linn CDP. Upon close inspection I determined that they were simply out of balance due to the heavy graphics on one side of the disk label surface. I might be wrong but this seems to be a real potential problem area. I no longer use these for audio.

I agree with Sean,but my experience, with my cdp
is because of moisture, I open my player and wipe
the lens with smooth auric illuminator cloth,You
can also try the auric illuminator to apply with
your cds, dont do it with the chesky, read the
instruction.This solve the skipping problem,
alignment problem?Posssible too.Dont get excited
replacing the lens yet. Do basic things first.
Good luck.

Ajpat, my 7-8 yr old Karik is having lots of problems w CD-Rs and only a very occasional problem w commercial CDs. If the laser indeed is the problem, I may be out of luck, because parts for the laser assembly of older Kariks are no longer available. If I am able to get a replacement laser assembly, I'll probably keep the Karik for quite a while and update with a DAC -- I agree the Karik is a very good transport. I've sent my Karik to Linn in Jacksonville to find out exactly where I stand, and I'd be glad to let you know what I hear from them.