Why do CD-Rs work poorly when anti-skip protection is enabled?
When a CD player is playing a disc without any sort of anti-skip protection, it spins the disc at 1x, and attempts to correct whatever errors it gets. If it can’t correct them, it does the best it can and keeps going. When an anti-skip feature (such as Sony’s “ESP”) is in use, the disc is played at a faster speed (perhaps 2x), and when uncorrectable errors are encountered, the failed section is re-read. CD-R discs are generally harder to read than pressed discs, so there is a greater likelihood of encountering uncorrectable errors. In some cases a player may get stuck re-reading a particular section, and the playback will have lots of skips and jumps as a result. The skip protection feature can usually be turned off on portables. On car players you may have to find a brand of media that works better.
