Andy Evans wrote:

Being my usual stubbornly questioning self,

If anything was noticed by your posts here its that you were stubbornly
*un*questioning.

I have to report that the
CD-ROM is currently bolted to a piece of alu held in a vice on the floor and
supported in front with a tennis ball.

WTF?

Next step - a small marble chopping board to bolt it to.

Why ruin a perfectly good chopping board?

The motor vibrates quite a bit - possibly this may have an
effect on error correction. It has been pointed out that a CD-ROM reads binary
code perfectly adequately even allowing for its internal vibration, but I
suppose it could also be said that it was designed to be bolted to a fairly
inert computer to do so.

You must be joking. have you ever *heard* the racket a typical bargain
bucket PC makes when reading a disc at over 16x?

I suspect it would read binary data anyway.

Its hardly likely to start reading trinary...

Certainly one of my designer friends seems to think there is something
in this.

How come you guys always have a 'designer friend' ?