How does a CD player pause a CD if the CD continues to turn? — BC, Oxon, England
A CD player reads ahead of the sound it is playing so that it always has sound information from at least one full turn of the disc in its memory. It has to read ahead as part of the error correcting process—the sound information associated with one moment in time is actually distributed around the spiral rather than squeezed into one tiny patch. This reading ahead is particularly important for a portable CD player, which usually saves several seconds of sound information in its memory so that it will have time to recover if its optical system is shaken out of alignment. When you pause the CD player, it reads ahead until its memory is full and then lets its optical system hover while the disc continues to turn. When you unpause the player, it uses the sound information it has saved in its memory to continue where it left off and its optical system resumes the reading ahead process.