I have a few that have gone bad. The most noticeable was Sade's disc "Promise" It skipped constantly and when I took it out of the player and held it up to the light, it had hundreds of tiny pinholes that you could see right through the label. It appeared that the "silver" or aluminum coating containing the information was slowly disintegrating. On a few other discs, the silver plus the label had pinholes. Maybe some sort of chemical reaction between the label and the information layer? Most of my cd's are fine. A Kinks and Joan Armatrading discs I bought in the 80's still work fine as do 99% of my collection. And as everyone knows, any damage to the label side will wipe out the information directly beneath it.
The awful truth about CDs, do they have the same shelve life as LP's ?
The answer is properly not. Recent studies have shown that the chemicals used in their manufacture of CDs have reduced their life expectancy to ten years, not all but many, as per Paul Mcgowans email. The suggestion was given that if you have suspect CD's they should be re-copied. But my question is how do you identify these? I can tell you that I have a great deal of LPs and I can play anyone of these with great success and some are 40 years old. This no doubt would give some audiophiles another good reason to hold onto their belief that LPs are the way to go.