A "scratchy" sound from your CD player can certainly be valid...... first
place to investigate is the disc itself, try some other commercially made
discs..... or could be a dirty laser lens, faulty gears or lubrication on
the laser sled, faulty spindl

SNIP

The cause of the scratching noise can be attributed to many things.

If the lady has WindowsXP on her machine, the CD-ROM drive can be set up to
treat the audio CD as a CD-ROM disc and digitally extract the audio and play it
through the CPU as opposed to playing it directly off the drive. This is
especially true is she is using Windows Media Player 9 to play the CD.
Sometimes, the scratchy noise could be due to a bad interrupt request setting
with the internal sound card.

This was the case with my computer when I tried to play CDs and other sounds,
so I had to place the sound card in a different PCI slot to stop IRQ sharing
between the sound card and another peripheral on my machine. Of course, the
computer being discussed on this topic is a laptop. - Reinhart