CD's Deterioration

Ben: Specifically, what is deteriorating on your CDs? Does it render them unplayable or just sonically degraded?

I have one in which you can see where the film has flaked off and you can see light through the film layer. It starts to play and then "skips". I've had it for years and I tried to play it about 6 months ago and found the damage.

That would do it. Poor substrate, not unlike poor magnetic tape substrate quality in some brands.

what kind of cd is that. I still have the first cd i ever bought from 1985. It sounds as auful as it did new. but still physically fine.

I'm not sure exactly how old it is. It is the Rainmakers "Tornado" CD which I bought when it first came out. When I found the problem, I set it aside and forgot about it until I saw the USA Today article. There were a couple of other interesting facts in the article. One related to how even sticking with the same major brand of CD-R blanks didn't guarantee you would get the same quality product. The article also explains why some rot and some don't.

I have a CD full of pinholes, going back to 1984, although I bought it when I first purchased the cd player in 1987, The cd is on Philips label. Iuse it even today as a test cd since many players seem to have a problem playing this one, I guess it is a good test of the error correction system.

I remember having read an article long time ago probably in early 90's stating that the ink developed for printing initially would penetrate the polocarbonate layer and eat up the aluminium foil layer so Dupont did a research into ink technology and came up with a new type of ink which would take care of the problem. apparently after 92 or 93 this problem was solved. This does not happen with all the early cd's since I have a few still in my collection from the mid 80's and they are fine.

Anyone else remember this article? Surely it must be in print media and not internet.

I was informing all about problems with CDR's 2-3 years ago. Hopefully those threads have been archived, as to save everyone the headache of re-hashing the same subject.

My first CDs still sound fine. I find degradation only when I abuse them. (Sony, etc. must love me.....)

Things have gotten much better of late since I got my Audio Aero with the puck that prevents the CDs from slipping as the transport gets up to speed.

That, an the fact that my wife will just put my CDs back in their cases in randam order when I leave too many of them laying about. And, yes the Audio Aero puck is a real good thing..........

According to someone on Audio Asylum the problems relates to manufacturing faults at a single European CD pressing plant in the mid 1980s. They found out what was wrong, corrected it and offered free replacement CDs.

BTW, a similar problem occurred with some Laserdisc.