RAY: Hi. We're back. You're listening to Car Talk with us, Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, and we're here to talk about cars, car repair, and, duh, the answer to last week's Puzzler. And this came from the audio files.
TOM: The audio "X-Files."
RAY: Some weeks ago, I was convinced by my son that we needed a new CD player for the house, even though the old one worked great. So we bought this new CD changer, and I hooked it up to the sound system in my living room. Then I had to decide what to do with the old one. I was about to offer it to my brother for 200 bucks when I realized that I could hook it up to my Bose wave radio in the kitchen.
TOM: Mmm.
RAY: I have this terrific radio, but I was too cheap to buy the one with the CD player.
TOM: Yeah.
RAY: So I hook it up and I put on my favorite song of the moment, which is "Iko, Iko," and I crank up the volume.
TOM: Could you give us a little excerpt from it? How does it go? "Iko."
RAY: Can I hear you say, "Iko, Iko, Iko, Iko, unday. Jockamo feeno ai nane. Jockamo fee nane"? Anyway, I put the thing on, and it's skipping like mad. Being the master of diagnosis that I am, I begin to perform a series of tests. I take my Tish Hinojosa CD.
TOM: Mmm-hmm.
RAY: And I put it in the old CD player. It works fine. Doesn't skip at all. Aha! I say. The "Iko, Iko" CD must be junk. So, I take it over to the new CD player.
TOM: Good, good.
RAY: Right? Right?
TOM: Good, good. Yup.
RAY: I plunk it in the new CD player, expecting it to skip like crazy, and it doesn't.
TOM: Oh.
RAY: So I take it back to the old CD player, and I perform a couple of technical adjustments.
TOM: Yeah, right.
RAY: Boom.
TOM: Did they involve the back of your hand? Or the palm?
RAY: The back of my hand, the palm of my hand. I drop it. I kick it. I figure...
TOM: Uh-huh. Yeah.
RAY: I put "Iko, Iko" in, and it skips all over the place. I said, Jeez, there's got to be something wrong with my old CD player. I'm going to have to sell it to my brother after all. But there isn't anything wrong with it. How did moving the old CD player 50 feet from the living room to the kitchen disturb this thing and make it malfunction? 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. And for having his answer selected at random from among all the correct answers that we got, Michael's going to get a $25 gift certificate to the store at the Car Talk section of cars.com.
[ Car Talk Puzzler ]
