Oct 14, 2000
RAY: This is a real-life Puzzler that recently happened to me.
Not long ago, I was convinced by my younger son that we needed a new CD player for our sound system. So we bought a new CD player, which holds three CDs instead of one. We installed it, and it worked beautifully.
Then I had a brainstorm. In my kitchen, I have a fancy Bose radio. But I was too cheap to get the CD player with it. Now, suddenly, I have an extra CD player.
I move the old CD player to the kitchen, plug it in, and start listening to my favorite CD, Tish Hinojosa.
Much to my disappointment, the CD is skipping all over the place. I throw another CD in the player, and it plays perfectly. I become convinced that there's something wrong with the Tish Hinojosa CD. So I go ahead and put it into the new CD player. It's perfect.
How could moving the old CD player 50 feet from the living room to the kitchen possibly have made it malfunction?
RAY: The answer is, it did, but not in the way you think.
TOM: Yeah.
RAY: And the mistake I made was that I didn't put it near, too close to the microwave or anything like that. I put the CD player down on the counter, and I put the radio on top of it.
TOM: Oh.
RAY: And when you play a song that has a lot of bass, like "Iko, Iko," boom-boom...
TOM: Mmm-hmm. Yeah.
RAY: The bass was making the thing shake...
TOM: Shakes everything.
RAY: And making the CD player skip, and when I played, you know, the melodious sounds of Tish Hinojosa...
TOM: Yeah. Of course, there was no big bass sound.
RAY: No big bass sound.
TOM: No vibration.
RAY: She got no stinkin' bass in her music.
TOM: Simple case of vibration.
RAY: Simple case of vibration and the CD player. Of course, I spent the better part of four weeks figuring this out. But that's another story. So who's our winner, man?
TOM: Well, the winner is Michael Levine from Portland, Oregon.
