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playing "top-damaged" CDs ?

Hi All,

I recently had over a hundred CDs water-damaged in the recent Vermont floods. A few were savable after air-drying, and others are just plastic and paper glued into small art objects. However, many CDs have some amount of cover or booklet attached to the face of the CD.The question is can CDs with small strips of paper fiber attached to the top surface be played? What amount of "stuff" might affect the playing/rotation of the disc. The paper is firmly attached and will not come flying off, (nor will I try tp peel anything).

The equipment is an AudioLab 6000 CDT transport with read-ahead buffer.

Any input appreciated.

BTW - over 1300 CDs were above water and survived intact - what I lost was all my Grateful Dead, Hot Tuna, Loop Guru, and lots of reggae.

[Related query- will a radio station or library label on a CD affect playing?]

 

thanks,

Richard

128x128richalan
jtcf's avatar
jtcf
1,589 posts
 

Warm soapy water should work. Just like soaking a label off of a glass jar.

bigkidz
3,324 posts
 

@richalan - I think you have dated yourself with Hot Tuna. LOL  When I was young we always rented a home on the NJ Shore with my buddies. I brought down a little stereo system and we met some nice young ladies and invited them over that night.  We had all this music (except for Hot Tuna).  My buddy told them, hey what do you want to hear, we have everything.  One of the girls said, got any Hot Tuna!  It is still a running joke all these years later!

I would advise the same, put in water and see what happens.

Happy Listening & Let Us Know what worked.

larryincmh
59 posts
 

Once you get this sorted out I would think the next thing to do would be to take all of those CDs and rip them to a network storage device. Then take the files and copy them onto another external hard drive that you can keep somewhere else. Maybe even get a terabyte of cloud storage and the back them up there as well. I have lost CDs in the past in similar manner and now go way overboard with backup and redundancy. 

travelinjack's avatar
travelinjack
159 posts
 

@bigkidz a girl requesting to listen to Hot Tuna is a keeper.

@richalan If you are ok with FLAC files, I have a ton of Dead shows ripped to FLAC.  I also have a fair amount of live Hot Tuna shows in FLAC file format.  If you are interested send me a private message to discuss getting you a link

boxcarman
324 posts
 

Some CD players are fussier than others.  I cannot tell you why.  Doesn't seem to have anything to do with price or supposed quality, or cleanliness.  Mystery.

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