I have experienced this before - about 8 years ago.

A week ago I turned to a song (mp3) in my truck, and listened. The music was playing about 2/3 its original speed, but the tone/pitch was exactly the same.

Its similar to if you were playing an mp3 in media player 9, and went to the speed settings and slowed it down.

Anyone experienced this? Can CD players do this? The first time this happened was 8 years ago in my taurus. Just a regular CD player. It was mid winter and I just got back from soccer practice.

Thats about the best I can explain it. Think of it as if you were listening to a band play live, and you told them to just stretch the song out. They wouldnt change their tone of voice (as if you were slowing down a tape), they would just sing longer.

 

If the CD player really is playing slower than normal, then it is true that the pitch would not change. Since it is a digital signal, it's either all or nothin'. If you slow down a digital signal and drag it out, basically it chops it up into pieces. There's actually periods of silence evenly distributed through the track. They are just happening so fast that you can't tell, it just sounds slower. If you use a program that speeds up/slows down mp3 files and you slow it WAY down you can hear this in action.

This is the best way I could think of to describe it to you... it's not really "technically accurate" but it gives you the idea.

 

I have seen this ONCE in fixing HUNDEREDS (Probably thousands) of CD players. It was a home stereo, forget who made it. It used a divide by network off of the microprocessor clock to derive a reference frequency for decoding the CD. The dived by net work was dropping every other bit so it was playing at half the speed, tone was the same. I’ve seen the complaint other times but was never able to recreate the symptom. In these cases I believe it was just a glitch in the processor doing the decoding, when the unit was powered off, sent to service and powered back on the processor re-set itself and all was good, the units never came back. Never run across it with MP3 files but I would think it’s the same principle.

 

NEEDAZ's explanation is much better.

 

I hear it happen a couple times on 92.3 in NYC. I guess one of their CD players went bad.

 

Finally got my soundcard to work right. I slowed down a song and increased the pitch to give you an idea of what my cd player did (on its own).

 

perhaps the servo is spinning at half its normal speed....does this with all cds? not just mo3?

 

Its actually about 20 percent slower.
No it doesnt happen all the time. I have had this CD player for 3 years or so, and it has only happened once.

Once in another vehicle I had about 7-8 years ago as well.

 

well, im a dj, (seems irrelevant i know) but anyways.....ok DJ type cd players with pitch bends....the servo actually speeds up and slows down along with a processor that cuts n splices the sound...thats where i got the idea from.

 

and if it only happened once, id sooner blame the cd burner encoding the mp3 wrong...i think the cd player is fine if it was a one time thing in three years.

 

Servo speed has nothing to do with this. In a car deck if the servo is not spinning-up at the correct speed it will never get a servo lock and it just will not play, usually giving you an error relating to not being able to read the TOC. If the servo reference is off it will not work, flat out. This is decoding problem, or not a problem if it doesn’t happen again.

 

Well, whatever the case is, it only happened once while playing an MP3. Probably wont ever happen again, but it sure made me feel like I was smoking something.