After several years of trouble-free service, it no
TDK DA-3826 CD Recorder: After several years of trouble-free service, the unit no longer records reliably. It appears to work during recording, but on playback the recordings have pops and other noise along with the signal.
Audio Players & Recorders - TDK - DA-3826 2-Disc CD Recorder
Answers & Comments
I'm hoping your problem is intermittent. Then there's hope.
I've been recording CD's for 10 years and have had similar experience on playback (way after it was too late to procure the source and do it again). My symptom was a nearly constant crackling laid over the audio (constant ineffective error concealment or correction).
I'm a professional Enterprise Data Storage (Tape and Disk) career customer engineer, so I know a little about things and how to troubleshoot Read errors.
I could never pin it down to anything repeatable, like media, but it seemed to happen most on CD's-R-US cheapo discs. The best I can offer is try some different brands (or lots) of media and see if you can find one or two that work.
Feed back what the results are if successful. Many people have the same problems.