What's the average life of a CD laser?

[Korian]

I have a CD player that's 4 years old and gets heavy use, it seems to be acting up skipping time to time. I will try to use my CD player cleaner, but how long is the average life? If it goes, I'm not bothering trying to get it repaired, it would be easier to buy a new one.

Thoughts?

[OmegaFlareX]

I would think it just depends on the player. My CD player (Sony 5-disc) is over 8 years old and still works great, although the jukebox mode gets wonkier every year. Now it usually can't go 5 songs without fucking up a whole disc - it picks up the disc, can't play it for whatever reason, then dumps the whole thing from memory (I have to open/close the CD drawer to reset it).

Maybe try moving your player to a more stable location? You might also be having trouble with scratched discs... time to burn some new copies.

[Rumpy]

My 5 year old sony disc man just died on me. It would skip like crazy and then lose the disc saying there was no disc in there. I tried cleaning the lense but it didn't work. I just got a new Panasonic disc man from BB. It's sick, came with batteries, one of those little remotes and plays MP3 encoded discs which is awesome. You can fit over 90 songs onto a cd (and I have to be past 12 hours of use and the batteries are still at full strength.

[Matt]

I believe weak drive motors are a major cause of CD player malfunction. Eventually it gets so that it can't spin the disk fast enough - this usually happens first with tracks near the centre of the CD.