Non-standard CD audio?, Bought four CDs that don't play right, yet advertised as standard Options

[Bjossi]

I've bought Enya - Watermark, Enya - Shepherd Moons, Madonna - Erotica, Madonna - Ray of Light and Madonna - True Blue (Remastered Ed). All from play.com. All these CDs can play, but the audio is so distorted that the music is unlistenable. Windows has no problems seeing the CD, and my media player sees the tracks and can play them, but the sound quality is anything but acceptable.

All of them were advertised as standard CDs, and I can not find any mention of special requirements on their product pages. Back in 2009 I bought all of Yello's CDs from this website and none of them have this problem, including the remastered editions. This is really puzzling me as Ray of Light was bought from a different seller, and they are by different artists, released in different years. I only experienced this with CDs bought from that website, Amazon have always delivered CDs that play as expected.

My CD drive is named 'TSSTcorp CDDVDW SH-S223B' (a Samsung drive I think.), with firmware that dates back to 2009 I think, can't remember the version.

Does anyone here have a clue what might be going on? Maybe you have one of these CDs bought from the same website?

Some further observations:
* Ray of Light was more stubborn than the others. It wouldn't play, but EAC could read it but had major trouble ripping it, and the resulting audio file made that struggle pretty clear. I suspect the seller misadvertised it as being in new condition.
* Some of these CDs were not in their factory seal despite being in new condition. Is this a common practice with online retailers?
* I'm pissed off!

EDIT: I should mention that I also bought Enya's And Winter Came and Amarantine that same day as the other Enya CDs, and they play just fine. I bought the Madonna albums few months later, earlier this month. Another CD bought from play.com that sounds normal is Electronic - Electronic, bought the same day as the Madonna CDs.

This post has been edited by Bjossi: Feb 26 2011, 15:43

[Jezulkim]

I have the same problem with my SH-S223B. Some discs sound very noisy with this drive. I think it might be copy protection, I can see thin rings between the tracks on the disc surface.

The discs worked fine with another drive (Sony DRU-810A).

[Akkurat]

I have the same problem with my SH-S223B. Some discs sound very noisy with this drive. I think it might be copy protection, I can see thin rings between the tracks on the disc surface.

The "rings" are with 99.9% certainty just silence between the tracks. Anyways, you can't certainly visually detect protections on the disc.. or if your drive makes a different noise spinning a disc.