It doesn’t. It reads only a tiny portion of the disk at any given moment. The disk spins and the reading system slowly works its way from the center of the disk towards its edge, following a spiral path around the disk.
Optically, they are identical. However, the laser disc player uses an analog recording technique (non-digital) to recreate the video signal. I think that the lengths of ridges (or perhaps pits) in the aluminum surface are used to control the analog signal strength.
The optical system of the CD player must be very clean. If the final lens has dust on it, the photodiode will not see the full range of light and dark patches that it expects. A cleaning CD presumably cleans this final lens, although I’m not sure how. In principle, the whole CD player should be pretty resistant to dust problems because the laser beams are large except when they focus on the CD itself.
I only know how the prerecorded mini disc players work: they work a lot like CD players. However, they use a much smaller disk, made possible by intelligent data reduction. Instead of using 16 bits to represent each current measurement, the mini disk uses a variable number of bits. The recording equipment determines how many bits are needed to represent the sound accurately and eliminates unnecessary (or inaudible) details in the current measurements. The optical systems in mini disc players are the same as CD players.
Most of the CD’s you encounter are prerecorded. These CD’s were mass-produced from a master, using plastic molding techniques, followed by metal deposition and painting. Recordable CD’s, which are used now in CD-ROM applications, are written by an intense laser beam, which alters the reflectivity of the CD spot by spot to create a disk that behaves just like a prerecorded CD. However, once a CD has been “written”, it cannot be cleaned for rewriting. At present, recordable CD’s can only be written once. There are some new optical and magneto-optical techniques around that allow erasure, but I don’t think these techniques have appeared in CD’s yet.
To record CD’s, you need a much more powerful laser and a blank recordable CD. Both of these items cost lots of money. Reading a CD does not alter the CD but writing it does. You need more laser power and a special CD disk. If you tried to record a normal CD, you would not be able to restructure its aluminum layer. You would not “erase” the old material on it and would not “write” new material onto it.
CD players must position their optical system very precisely, relative to the spinning disk itself. It uses very sophisticated electromechanical devices to keep it in place. But if you jar a player violently enough, it will lose its position and the audio may suffer. Most modern CD players save a short amount of information so that they are reading ahead of where they are playing. Even if they lose the track for a few hundredths of a second, they have enough music saved up that they can keep playing continuously. But if the upset is severe enough, they will run out of saved music and will go silent for a moment or two.
At this point, there should be very little difference between CD players that are playing perfect CD’s. They all create almost distortionless reproductions of the original sound. However, different players use different tracking techniques and optical systems and thus have different abilities to recover from imperfections in the CD.
Any light wave can be described in terms of horizontally and/or vertically polarized light. For most things, these two polarizations are unimportant. But when light reflects from surfaces or passes through certain materials, these polarizations become important. The charges in surfaces and materials do not always respond equally to the two polarizations of light. The two polarizations may even travel through very different paths (e.g. in the polarization beam splitter).
In general, the answer is no—there won’t be large regions of space in which the two light waves cancel one another. That’s because, while the electric fields from the two waves do add to one another at each moment, those fields go in and out of phase with one another very rapidly as the waves pass and the end result is that they do not interfere with one another over broad expanses. However, there can be points or surfaces in space at which the electric fields from the waves at least partially cancel for extended periods of time and at which there is destructive interference. These points and surfaces are often observed in experiments with single frequency laser beams.