On Saturday, April 10, 2021 at 10:15:11 PM UTC-4, micky wrote:


Bought a Maxell CD cleaner. Amazingly, it looks like a CD but has two
little brushes on it.

It's supposed to give audio instructions when you "play" it. How can it
do this if the laser or receiver lens is too dirty to work?



When you put the CD in, the CD spins, the laser sled goes looking for a reflective surface and then tries to focus on it. During this time, the spinning CD is brushing up against the lens even if the unit is not in "play".




At any rate, I ran it 4 or 5 times and it doesn't say anything.

Is that enough evidence to firmly conclude it's broken and cleaning
won't help?


Waste of time. Dirty CDs don't work one day and not the next, unless there was a substantial influx of dust and dirt blown into the mechanism. Auto CDs in particular are fairly well protected against this. If your CD stopped playing suddenly, something happened to it. First guess is a slipping loading or sled belt.

I don't work on CDs any more, but when I did, dirty lens usually resulted in a complaint of erratic skipping or muting, and even then, it pointed more to a weak laser than a dirty lens. Cleaning the lens used to buy some time at best.