HDX behaving oddly.
Posted by: dave marshall on 10 March 2018
In the past, whenever my HDX has refused to recognise and rip a CD, the easy solution was to copy the CD onto a CDR, which then never failed to rip.
Just recently, I've had a couple which the HDX failed to recognise, and no amount of "polishing" the disc cured things.
However, as I was ripping a batch of CD's, I bunged the dodgy one back in at the end of the session, and, hey presto, it ripped fine.
There's no logical explanation for this, but has anyone else experienced this strange behaviour from their HDX? 
I did have one CD once that wouldn't rip on my Unitiserve. It used to just not recognise it as a CD, even though it worked fine in several different CD players. I tried it off and on and one day it did rip just fine.
I had thought that this was a copy protection mechanism as this wasn't a recent CD. But the fact it suddenly did rip suggested to me that it was a manufacturing fault that put it a bit near the edge of what CD indexes are supposed to present to the player and because the US was nicely warmed up, it just got enough info off the disc index to work out what it was and hence was able to read the data off the rest.
So maybe your HDX was just nicely warmed up. Whether there is a CD issue there or a forthcoming HDX CD mechanism problem, I don't know.
best
David
Interesting, having sent some cd,s off to Naim some time ago they just got back to me. Two that I could not rip they had no problem with....perhaps with the latest firmware I will have more luck. Five others they said would not rip on a slimline optical drive used in the Core. They have been able to rip these on a full size optical drive, and will send me the details of what they have found. Visually they all looked fine to me.
Further to my earlier posting, I have just spent an hour finding that CD and ripping it to my Core (previously was imported from the Unitiserve). It was interesting.
1) It takes really quite a long time for the Core to recognise that it is a CD and it can read the data. I would think twice as long as normal. The Rovi lookup is quick though.
2) The first four tracks of the five on the CD ripped fine but the fifth ripped with errors so I aborted the rip and cleaned the disc. Then I ripped it again and this time let it finish. The first four tracks ok and the fifth had 7 errors.
3) I gave the CD a really careful clean and this time the last track had 32 errors! So I cleaned it several more times and gradually got the errors on the fifth track down to 11. The moral of this story is don't bother to clean your CDs I suppose!
4) I played the track with 32 errors and listened out for them. I knew where they were more or less from the rip % counter. Very conveniently the track in question was exactly 10 mins long, so the errors which were at 71-73% of the rip could easily be listened for. I can't be sure I heard anything wrong at all and the only thing I noticed was that the time counter on the playback did a hiccup about the time of the errors.
So apologies for going off-topic on the thread, but maybe it is of interest in the context of the OP's question.
best
David
Had several problems with discs and the serve in the 4+ years I owned one but since I brought an NS01 (same DVD drive as HDX and DVD5) I have had no problems, although the drive had been just replaced in NS01 by Naim. I would guess your drive is beginning to fail but you could try cleaning the lens!
I've experienced a few discs which were not recognised and not ripped. I never had one not recognised but then, later recognised that I am aware of.
I have also experienced the odd few discs not ripping, then a restart of the HDX made them rip OK.
One disc that simply refused to be read or ripped was ZZ Top Greatest Hits. Like you, I copied it to CD-R and it ripped just fine.
My HDX would occasionally not rip a disc. After being sent to Naim when the power supply failed I was surprised to see that they had also replaced the CD mechanism. No problems ripping discs after that.
Perhaps your mechanism is on the way out.
Yeah I've had that a couple of times; my solution was copy the cc to the hard drive of my PC and put it in DOWNLOADS.
I sent my HDX to the local authorized repair facility to have the HDD replaced. When I got it back it started to have ripping errors. I guess the trip to- and from- the repair facility was too much for the optical drive. It was replaced and all is well since. I'm guessing ripping errors generally mean an issue with the drive. Strangely, optical DVD drives are pretty robust in computers (I've never had one go bad in the last 10-15 years and they get much more use than in my HDX). Not sure why they appear so stressed in the HDX. I do know that NAIM flashes their own firmware onto the drive (disabling some of the error correction algorithms to get that "bit-perfect rip"). Hopefully that doesn't cause any issues