'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

To make things more fun, I've opened up the DVD player and can't see any sign of magic smoke escaping from something. So I put it back together and tried a handful of other CDs in it (both pressed and burnt) and everything works fine... except for the one I was playing when I first heard the interference, and another supposedly-known-working disc I tried after the first started misbehaving.

I'm now trying those two discs in my PC and the Plextor drives are not having any of it. The DVD writer actually claimed that disc 1 was an empty CD-R, while on disc 2 the CD writer has spun right down and is still throwing shedloads of errors.

I think I happened to start testing with the two most flaky CD-Rs in my collection.