Why are CD's decling in quality?

Polycarbonate has always been used for the clear layer in CDs so newer CDs should not be more liable to wear and tear than older CDs.

Multiple lasers? Now, That's funny!!

Courtesy Wikipedia:

"Many early LDs were not manufactured properly; sometimes a substandard adhesive was used to sandwich together the two sides of the disc.[citation needed] The adhesive contained impurities that were able to penetrate the lacquer seal layer and chemically attack the metalized reflective aluminium layer, causing it to oxidize and lose its reflective characteristics. This was a problem that was termed "laser rot" among LD enthusiasts, also called "color flash" internally by LaserDisc-pressing plants. Some forms of laser rot could appear as black spots that looked like mold or burned plastic which cause the disc to skip and the movie to exhibit excessive speckling noise. But, for the most part, rotted discs could actually appear perfectly fine to the naked eye.

Later optical standards have been known to suffer similar problems, including a notorious batch of defective CDs manufactured by Philips-DuPont Optical at their Blackburn, Lancashire facility in England during the late 1980s/early 1990s."

Hevac1 wrote,

"So Geoffkait what do they use to read the data from CD's?"

Is this a trick question?

Many people find Japanese LPs to be of superior quality.

Hi, suspect you might possibly be confusing access time performance for computer hard drives with audio performance for CD players and CD transports. If many people are looking for some data in the woods they will find it faster than if only one person is looking for it. Just a hunch.

The closer you look at how CDs work, the more it stinks.

:-)