What year model is your LS430 (2001-2003 or 2004-2006)? Do you have a Pioneer audio system or Mark Levinson?

 

nluv in case you don’t know, the way to tell if it’s the Mark Levinson system is to just look at the stereo head unit. It will be labeled on there if it is.

 

 

cd error 1 is a dirty disc, probably not your issue. cd error 3 or 4 is different. anyway if you have Mark Levenson or base stereo the cd player is Pioneer, as is the cassette player. try disconnecting the negative battery cable, you will need a 10mm nut driver or socket and leave it disconnected for at least 10 minutes(half an hour would be better). reconnect battery cable and turn on the car. push eject button a few times and see if it spits out the offending cd. owner manual recommends not using homemade cd's, but we all do. just make sure the cd that you use are of high quality, no labels on the disc. this has worked for me twice.

 

Oh yeah, this. I totally forgot, but my 2001 with Mark Levinson had the same issue. I was using homemade CDs that I burned myself. These are ever so slightly thinner than CDs from record companies and seem to get jammed pretty often. I was able to get the offending CD to eject simply by trying many, many, many times. Other than that, the CD players in these cars aren't really something you can easily service yourself I don't believe. You may want to just replace the CD player itself (I think it's a completely separate component from the main head unit), possibly find an inexpensive unit from a junk yard? Just a guess...

Other than that, the quickest and cheapest short term work around I can think of is to buy one of those cassette adapters that let you plug in a phone/ipod using a 3.5mm headphone plug to listen to music. These can be found at a lot of retailers like Walmart and cost around $10-$15. The sound quality is going to be lower than a CD, but not a lot lower... depending on how much of an audiophile your husband is. The other similar option is to buy an FM transmitter that will essentially accomplish the same thing for around the same $10-$15 price range. It plugs into the 12v outlet/cigarette lighter, also has a 3.5mm headphone plug to plug a phone/ipod into, and transmits over an FM station of your choosing and you tune your car stereo to that same frequency. The biggest downfall of these is that since they transmit a very low power FM signal, the result is usually a lot of "bleed through" depending on where you live and how many radio stations are near you - the FM transmitter will be fighting to overpower the much higher power radio stations. Since you want to set the transmitter to an FM frequency that isn't already occupied by - or close to - a local station, using these in metropolitan areas doesn't usually work too well as there are likely to be a lot of radio stations transmitting across the entire FM band. The best way to go about finding the best frequency is to take a few minutes and manually scroll across the entire FM band and find a frequency that doesn't have any radio stations near that frequency and all you hear is static. Example: a radio station comes in clearly on 91.5MHz, can be heard somewhat with static on 91.7, and heard even less on 91.9. If there's nothing but static on 92.1 and 92.3, and you start hearing the next radio station bleeding through the static on 92.5, and this station comes through clearly on 92.7, then you'd want to set the FM transmitter in your car to 92.1 or 92.3.

The FM transmitter and cassette tape adapters are far from ideal, but definitely beat silence or local commercial ridden FM stations.