So my Monsoon head unit, about a year ago, gave me an ERR message one cool morning upon startup. Panicking at first, i re-entered the disc and it worked fine. It got progressively worse, at first just on colder morning and finally would not work after 25+ retries. A couple days of the radio down here got to my head, so today/night I figured I would rip it out and inspect it, more for fun than anything. After taking the CD deck out of the actual head unit, i was playing with the connections, and figured I would try to get to the lens and maybe run a sock or microfiber over it. The lens is too tucked inside there, though, so all I could do was run a Q-tip over it. Reassembling it, I just plugged it back in my car. it works!!!!!

Dont let those dealerships rack up hundred dollar repair bills when it only takes a couple painstakingly slow hours and a Q-tip to fix.

If I get some more time and it's daylight outside, I can provide pictures to walk people through it, if need be.

 

Sweet deal!!

 

Could also have tried a lens cleaning disc. It's a CD with a few small fibers hanging down from it that "sweeps" the lens clean. Just put it in like any ordinary CD. They're really cheap and you can get them just about anywhere.

 

Bringing the thread back from the dead.

I've had the same ERR error from my Monsoon CD player so following Kip's advice, I disassembled my Moonsoon unit (to where I can see the CD player lens) and gave it a good cleaning (blew off the lens with compressed air and wiped the lens with a reading glass cloth [microfiber would probably work but I wanted a finer cloth]) and my CD player is now finally able to read any CD I insert.

I've tried the CD cleaner (the CD with a brush attached) with no success and tried the compressed air method (sticking the straw inside the CD player to blow off any dust on the lens) and from disassembling the unit, there was no way that the compressed air method would work since the lens is far back in the unit.

 

But what about the stock cd changer? Most of the cds I play wont play any songs after song number 10. Sometimes it might play but it takes a while to start playing.