Oddity Archive: Episode 280.1 - CD Rot Rant (Audio CD’s)
Vložit
- čas přidán 17. 06. 2024
- Benny-boy’s (non-accredited) Physical Media Studies class is now in session!
Visit our website at www.oddityarchive.com
Social Media:
Facebook: / oddityarchive
Twitter/X: @oddityarchive
Help out the Archive by making a monthly donation to our ongoing Patreon campaign. Visit the campaign at / oddityarchive - Věda a technologie
Quick Links:
0:21 - Intro
2:48 - Is CD rot real?
4:21 - CD-R’s
14:18 - Early CD’s
19:25 - Late 80’s/early 90’s U.K. CD’s
22:24 - Bad manufacturing, not rot
25:22 - Closing
Out of 2000-ish commercially manufactured CDs I've owned, I've come across exactly *one* which was unplayable due to disc rot.
and that was 'Lost in Translation' OST album that was pressed on a CD-R?
@@CSSTPMedia No, a real pressed compilation CD. I did a video about it years ago.
I have CD-R's that are absolutely covered in mold and very badly rotted. They seem to be from sometime around 2009 - 2012, judging by the music on them and the CD-Rs they're on. I found them in a disk holder while at work, and they looked like they were submerged in water and damp leaf litter for ages. Amazingly, despite some struggling and some pretty horrid ticking, they still play mostly alright when put in the right CD player. A real testament to the durability of CDs.
Interesting one, thanks Ben. I noticed a weird phenomenon in my last car where a large portion of CDs would malfunction - I thought it was just due to the stereo system being two decades old, but eventually I realized discs manufactured post-2000 or so would just spin and spin and eject without playing, while discs from the ‘90s and earlier worked just fine. The manufacturing quality theory makes sense.
I always remember how much better the Philips owned companies CDs (Polygram/Island, ETC) felt compared to other label's discs. The plastic felt heavier, the edges were rounded and solid compared to a hard sharp edge clearly just cut right out of a hunk of plastic, and the silkscreening also felt like 3 times as thick.
Early Polygram CDs from 1983-1985ish did often have quite thin, rough edges (though ones from about 1986 onwards don't). I'd agree though that the 1980s West German Polygram boxes feel among the nicest jewel cases I've handled, though. Older American CDs for some reason often had quite lightweight and flimsy jewel cases compared with European ones, potentially because US boxes were typically distributed in longboxes unlike in Europe which never used them. European cases only generally began becoming lighter from the mid 1990s, which was also around the time that clear trays became standard on new releases.
Something trivial is that Polygram/PDO manufactured CDs from the 1980s almost all have a 0.32-0.33 second pregap before Track 1, while nearly all Japanese made and Sony CDs lack this. Other manufacturers tended to be quite mixed in this regard. I've theorised in the past that old discs with the third of a second pregap were probably mastered using Philips PCM encoders and those without were probably mastered with Sony encoders. Nearly all Japanese manufacturers I think used Sony encoders while in Europe I think Philips equipment was more widely used, and I think US engineers used a mixture of both.
Ben, thanks for the trip down CD memory lane! I bought my first player when I was 20 or so in 1986. I forgot about the target labeling back then, and how Polygram discs were silver all the way from the edge to the center hole. I might now have to go to my old dusty collection and check out my old discs!!!
I have a late 80s commercially produced cd that looks like an antique mirror in a horror movie and still plays great
21:23 That Jets album did indeed get a new title in the UK (it was issued there on MCF 3312 as "Crush on You" in June 1986). In all the rest of the world, the album was self-titled.
Excellent choice for the bump out!
I got those steamroller blues!
Oddly, the only disc I have that rotted on me was a PC copy of Worms Armageddon.
That’s not disc rot, its worms eating the disc 😊
I have not experienced disc rot on stamped discs, but I have on some old CD-R's. A backup of some of my old projects degraded enough that they are lost forever (and lessons were learned about backups.) But I think most disc problems I've had are from mishandling from a previous owner - left it on the dashboard in their car too long, that sort of thing.
The PolyGram manufactured CD’s for WEA (Warner,Elektra/Asylum, Atlantic) had the color target labels, with the Japanese ones were the Silver background with different colors around the cd.
Apparently, JVC had Bad pressers, as my Japanese pressed copy of Bad Company’s 1986 album, “Fame And Fortune”, wouldn’t play between tracks 2-8 at all, but played tracks 1 and 8-10 perfectly!
A lot of my band stuff is on cdrs so yes I worry about CD rot all the time. Yes I have seen discs go bad over the last 25 years. I always back up everything to my hard disc drives in flac on two separate drives. Especially old band cds I treat like gold. So I understand what you are saying Ben.
My friend's band used CDrs too and their rarest one plays well but then a well-known bands compiltion CD went bad unfortunately.
Over the years, I've had numerous CD-R's fail after only five years or so. Most of them were music compilations made from albums and other CDs I already had in my collection, so I didn't really "lose" anything when those became unplayable. So far, the only "pressed" disc I've found that no longer plays is the 3 inch single of Fleetwood Mac's "As Long As You Follow".
I have one of the first CDs YEDS•4 Compact Disc Demonstration Vol. 1 from 1982 and that plays perfectly.
Although I threw out tonnes of PDO UK CDs which sucks as that was a lot of ORB/KLF and other trance stuff 🚬😮💨
@@Rokios I still have CDs pressed by PDO of Blackburn, Lancs. Not only PDO pressed CDs for Philips-owned record labels they also pressed some for CBS Records like Billy Joel's Turnstiles which I have the CD of, the album was 1976 but the CD I have is from 1989.
admittedly I was never careful with my cd's but probably about 40% of mine went bad with the covering peeling off or stains appearing in the surface or pock marks. mine dated from the late 80's to the early 2000's and I am from the uk. often wondered if that is partly down to the dampness in the UK compared to America
There's no shortage of humid regions in the U.S. It gets humid enough around here that I keep a dehumidifier running more or less year-round.
Having just converted my collection from about the same period, in the uk too, I found 4 with rot. Out of about 4 or 5 hundred.
Mostly singles oddly.
But no, whatever has happened to yours, not a ‘uk thing’ as far as I’m aware.
I’ve found that it seems to have different effects whether you’re near freshwater or salt water. Saltwater seems to have more oxidizing effects, and causes plastics, adhesives & metals to break down faster.
The Nimbus CD pressing plants in the UK were in Cwmbran and Monmouth (both in Wales, not England). My Aunt's husband used to work in the Cwmbran plant and had a box full of "half inched" CDs - no cases, just soft paper/cloth covers that he helped himself to when nobody was looking...
And those Nimbus pressing plants pressed one of Britain's first DVD releases for Carlton Home Entertainment.
@@CSSTPMedia I remember him saying that they were moving over to DVD production when the format started to take off, they eventually changed their name to Technicolour if memory serves
@@figureheaduk It was re-named in 2000, named after the American film technology company of the same name, which Carlton Communications happen to have owned before they sold it off to Thomson Multimedia in 2001 to focus on the homogenisation of ITV.
The majority of pre-2000 UK commercial pressings of non-major label releases seemed to be made by Nimbus - this includes Factory Records releases, Creation releases, some Jive releases and a lot of very small scale pressings by unsigned artists, as well as a lot of UK made CD-ROM software discs. My own experience with their quality control is mixed - some suffer from what I term invisible rot, though around 80% are fine. I've got a confirmed 1984 Nimbus pressing (one of their earliest ones) of New Gold Dream by Simple Minds and it plays fine. Interestingly its matrix states "Nimbus England" while later Nimbus discs almost all state "Mastered By Nimbus", and I also thought their factory was in Wales. Was this "Nimbus England" disc possibly made in the CD factory at Virgin's flagship store, which I think had ties to Nimbus (it was also on Virgin Records)? Either way it's an excellent disc in almost every way.
I think Nimbus were technically a classical label but since they had the first CD factory in the UK they probably made a lot of their income from manufacturing discs on behalf of companies without their own CD facilities.
@@gourlishvideos I have the earlier DVD pressing of Blackadder 1, released in 1999 by BBC Worldwide, and it was made in Wales by Nimbus and it used the Nimbus logo.
I've seen other videos on this topic. I've spot checked my collection on occasion. I haven't yet had any problems from age with manufactured CDs back to 1988 nor burned CDs for data back to 1996-the gold Kodak ones that were $8 each. I know dye degradation can happen but I have yet to discover it out of thousands of burned CDs from the 2000's.
I've had a similar experience regarding disc rot, though the majority of my pressed CDs are CD-ROM game discs from the early to mid 2000s, all stored in one of those 100+ CD zip up sleeves. All of those pressed discs still read fine to this day, even the oldest game discs I own. As for CD-Rs, I've had those go bad on me for one strange reason. There was one particular CD sleeve I stored them in, and over time, I noticed the discs I put in there were starting to develop pinholes. I transferred them to another CD sleeve and the pinholes stopped appearing. I guess the offending CD sleeve had some sort of chemical in the plastic that reacted to the reflective layer of the CDs I put in it, causing the holes. I've also had various CD-Rs where the reflective layer just started to shed off. And they were simply stored either in a case or on a plastic disc spindle. And not all of my CD-Rs have gone bad in that same manner. I guess it just depends on storage conditions (which I admit weren't the best at all times) and quality of the disc themselves, especially if they were the cheapie dollar store discs.
Had a commercially pressed DVD that one day just would not play at all. The color looked weird on the data side but I didn't know if it was disc rot or not. Then one day it started playing again for no reason. It boggles the mind.
I literally deal in discs all day and other than how people may have treated them ie scratches and stuff its quite rare to come across one thats in some way rotted or hazy or wont play.
I do have a CD made in the UK by PDO of Blackburn, Lancashire and that was 'Welcome to the Beautiful South' released in 1989. I have a lot of CDs made by Nimbus and also a lot pressed at DADC Austria.
The earliest CD pressing I have is ELO's 'Discovery' and it was made in Japan by CBS/SONY and the album was from 1979 but the CD was from 1983.
A LOT of PDO discs are like that. Though I've never had an issue with any playing.
The disc I referenced in another comment, looking like an antique silver mirror, came from PDO. It started to go round the edges within a couple of years of buying it, in spite of always being kept indoors, in the shade etc.
My only disc with rot is a laserdisc of the Phantom Menace. (And I own thousands of optical discs)
I would like to add that I have managed to get table of contents material off a CRACKED CD-R. Those things are crazy.
I have had issues only with:
- Taiwanese bootleg editions;
- Queen’s Greatest Hits manufactured in Japan, early 1980s;
- the enhanced CD of the special edition of Karma by Delerium; audio only part included.
The Taiwanese bootlegs I can only imagine due to ugly manufacturing; Queen because the weight of the disc; Delerium due to what I suspect a cluttered index. These were all giving issues on my late 90s Sony. Modern bluray systems have no issues with any of them.
As you mentioned but I will reiterate - DON'T USE PAPER LABELS on CDRs. No reason to now of course, but I did in the early days and about 50% of those are done. If they play you get the "ch-ch-ch" sound, like a radio badly tuned to a station. The worst offenders were Mitsui blanks, ironic considering they were the high end label I paid a premium for.
Honestly the current "epidemic" is the problem of the Technicolor (now "Vantiva") optical disc pressing plant in Guadalajara, MX having no QC. Many people get brand new Blu-ray discs that have minor circumferential scratches on them (from supposed boutique labels, no less) and it just causes the disc to be unplayable all the way through. It's happened to me more than once, and it's absolutely infuriating since BDs can't be resurfaced, and this problem only seems to become a problem after the return window has closed. I've got Sony's "The Terminator" on BD (a US launch day title), and despite the transfer aging pretty poorly, the disc (pressed at one of the Sony DADC plants) still works absolutely wonderfully for being nearly 20 years old.
Every time someone has shown me what they call 'CD rot', it has always been physical damage to the disc or the reflective layer at the top of the disc. Normally it is due to poor handling or storage of the disc.
Here in the UK CD pressings by PDO are infamous for getting CD rot/ bronzing, the second and third Soft Cell Albums i own on CD are sadly pretty much unplayable due to rot and a prized CD of the A L I E N soundtrack by Jerry Goldsmith is bronzed badly on the label side though for now still playable, all courtesy of ruddy PDO. :(
I feel your pain with these issues.
My CD of ABBA Gold has been bronzed but it is still playable. Thanks to PDO Blackburn, Lancs.
As someone in the UK I can confirm that nearly all CDs that suffer from bronzing are UK (Blackburn) made PDO discs that were manufactured between about 1988 and the end of 1993. Almost every UK PDO disc I've seen that was made during this era seems to suffer from some sort of discolouration on the label side (I can instantly tell them before confirming from the matrix), although in many cases the discs still play fine - buying one secondhand seems a bit of a gamble. In general you're more likely to have rot issues on the outer tracks of CDs longer than 60 minutes. I've got one PDO Blackburn CD from this era, a Fairport Convention compilation, which is unlistenable without doing a rip with enhanced recovery, after which it sounds reasonably good.
Some 1980s and early 1990s UK made Nimbus CDs also seem to contain faulty sectors yet unlike with PDO discs the rot is almost always invisible, meaning you can't tell if the disc is good or not until playing or ripping it. It's possible that some of these were faulty when new (the PDO discs have definitely developed the issue over time).
Some silver centre West German Warner CDs that were manufactured in 1986 and 1987 suffer from a huge number of pinholes which has a similar effect to disc rot, but the issue was probably there when the discs were new. My Madonna True Blue and eponymous Paul Simon CDs have this problem though thankfully the errors aren't very noticeable sounding when doing an enhanced rip with error correction (which takes a long time). This problem had been fixed by about 1988, which was around the time Warner switched to clear centres. Early 1983-1985 Warner Target CDs were made under licence, typically by Polygram in the case of West German ones, and these are mostly fine today.
I've often wondered why I've got some CDs that are quite scratched but play and rip completely error free, yet I have others which look in great condition with no visible sign of rot or pinholes but have lots of unrecoverable errors (certain Nimbus discs for example).
DVDs seem far more prone to rot in my experience than CDs. I suspect it's down to most commercial DVDs being dual layer (quite a lot of Laserdiscs have developed similar problems for this reason as well). At the same time I've also found that single layer DVD-Rs are more prone to rot and data corruption than CD-Rs.
I've only ever experienced CD rot with low quality CD-Rs. I've never seen it on commercially pressed CDs, nor on good quality CD-R brands such as TDK and Taiyo Yuden (the latter of which I still have a stockpile of blanks from the late '00s). Maybe I've just been incredibly fortunate?
Memorex really went downhill around 2010. I kicked over to Verbatim after that.
I have ABBA Gold: Greatest Hits and it was made by PDO of Blackburn, Lancs and the CD was from 1992 by Polar Music International (Svenska) and Polydor Ltd.
And guess what, it has bronzing on the front of the disc but it plays really well and rips fine on my external DVD drive.
1 - An audio CD has up to 640Megabytes (1,000,000 Bytes) of digital data. In the IT "biz" we worry about perfect copies/backups of Petabytes (1,000,000,000,000) of data to magnetic disk or tape. Yes, orders of magnitude of more data. So, audiophiles, STOP YOUR WHINING. CD's are probably MORE stable than mag disk or mag tape. How is this done? Checksums. You add up hunks of data and convert it into a number that is a very good representation of the data, every single little bittie. Through the use of multiple checksums, you can (pretty much) guarantee the accuracy of the data.
2 - The ear is ANALOG. It's like a vacuum tube, it smooths the data. No matter how perfect you think your ear is, you CANNOT HEAR A MISSED BIT. Whole sections? I'll give you that.
3 - No CD is guaranteed to be perfect. There's the standard of the manufacturer that it is "good enough." That's right, the CD that you think you hear imperfections on ALREADY HAD IMPERFECTION WHEN YOUR BOUGHT IT.
4 - And back around, you want to see if your disk has rotted, changed? STOP LISTENING, and do checksums. Get everyone you know to do checksums. Verify that the data is consistent across CDs (which it won't be) enough to decide on a "master' checksum for that CD run.
5 - This is what the experts are already doing when they check for manufacturing imperfections and "bit rot" over the age of the type/version/manufacturing run of CDs.
So technology trumps the ear. Maybe you just need a better CD reader.
Remember, though, audiophiles often totally don’t understand error correction and checksums. Techmoan has some videos on his channel about ways audiophiles would try to “reduce errors that would result in error correction” on their CDs, such as trimming the plastic casing or darkening the outside of the disc to “prevent light scatter causing interference”. You and I laugh at the idea, but certain audiophiles took it quite seriously (because they fundamentally don’t understand digital audio, and many of them don’t even understand analog audio I’d reckon).
@princeofcupspoc9073 100%. A good CD player will have a healthy buffer to offset the little errors.
@danthemainman1 I love when Mat covers that stuff. The marker-around-the-rim trick (even though I already knew about it) will never not amuse me.
I could be wrong on this but I thought CDs have nearer 740MB.
Concur on all experience going back to '98. I have that Firesign CD and ripped it about a year ago with no problems.
One name I never thought I would hear on an Oddity Archive episode was Brinsley Schwarz.
I know it's not the first time I've referenced them. Having said that, I'm probably one of the very few that owns all their (original) albums.
I only have had one CD fail and it was Chicago 19. It looked fine on the read side but the top had mold spots and once cleaned the mold off I saw were it had ate the aluminum.
This rot BS shows up every 5 years or so. I remember one scare about some fungus that allegedly ate its way on the discs recorded layer. Although it was supposed to have been a serious scientific study, it looked more like oxidation by plain water than anything else.
A lot of people are also unaware of the error correction of the CD standard and redundancy on some media and it was done to prevent reading errors and data loss should situations similar to “rot” or laser malfunction appear, which in turns extend both reliability and durability of the media.
I have a Ghostbusters II soundtrack CD I bought in a flea market to replace my unlistenable record copy from back in the day (audiophiles, we stopped using them for many reasons) and it was full of tiny holes. Despite that, I can still play it and was able to rip an image without errors.
As someone who has been buffing discs for 7 years I can tell you right now that if a disc doesn’t have that quality ink layer on top of the disc (silver top or gold top discs) then they are bound to get oxidized within like 15-20 years. Especially those early CDs on Mercury. Mercury, in my experience, was always cheap with manufacturing. Cassette sponges falling off, record jackets coming unglued, and CDs getting those pinholes through the top. Of course this is all anecdotal evidence.
My earliest Mercury CD's are from '88 or so, so I didn't include them. For what it's worth, two of my Rush CD's are late-80's, West German-made. Last time I had those out, they were fine.
I tend to mostly put most on my laptop as soon as get a new one . The most recent music one I bought was Fleetwood Mac dance soundtrack album cause I got the special.
I cannot see a Japanese release of an Oingo Boingo album and not immediately think of a certain pair of brothers from a certain Japanese series.
Disc rot happens quite a lot on burned discs for me, don’t recall it happening on ones that weren’t.
I've only experienced disc rot on CD-Rs that has not been properly stored, like in sunshine or in very humid conditions. I've never experienced it on properly stored CDs, DVDs or BluRays.
I have a habit of keeping a few different kinds of disc drives floating around simply do to the fact that a disc will sometimes just not read on one drive but works just fine in another. I figure with most discs as long as I can get a good proper rip we're set, not to mention the convenience of just having a proper FLAC file ready to go.
I have an LG Bluray drive on my PC, I used it to rip hundreds of CDs. But, it just doesn't like some DVDs for whatever reason. It just spins and spins until it gives up.
Meanwhile? They all load first try on the slimline laptop DVD drives on a USB enclosure I got.
(There's also the matter of Windows no longer reading some early PC CDs due to security updates but that's a whole other topic...)
People really WANT CDs to be bad, maybe as a cope for how easily vinyl and tape gets damaged/wears out. CDs last forever, especially the glass master ones. They designed those suckers well, error correction and everything. Even when a CD is in sketchy condition, if you use a really good ripper and drive (I've found Exact Audio Copy and the CD drive in my 2006 eMachines PC can rip things my other drives choke on), it's pretty hard to get a truly flawed rip, let alone just playing the disc. CD-Rs, I have stuff going back to the Limewire days and to my knowledge, it all plays as fine as it did when it was burned. I betcha most of the "rot" is either bad manufacturing as you said or people not taking care of their CDs--hot cars, scratching them up, etc.
I just passed owning 200 CDs in my collection, most used, most from the 90s and 2000s, a few from the 80s, and I've only ever had two with any issues. Two out of 232 CDs and CD boxsets (so likely well over 250 individual discs). One was the Black Keys' Magic Potion, so Warner/Nonesuch, 2006, which tracked fine but gained really nasty stuttering issues (I wish I still had that disc, I threw it out and have since replaced it), and Superdrag's The Fabulous 8-Track Sound of Superdrag, which was a 1995 indie release for a label called Darla Records. That one had some skipping issues on the last song, and depending on the disc drive and ripping program I used (when not using the aformentioned EAC + eMachines setup), through the rest of the disc. No scratches, probably some damage to one of the layers of the disc.
DVDs are an even sillier argument about wearing out to have, given that DVDs use a much different layer sandwich that isn't as susceptible to rot. Blu-rays doubly so.
Yeah, it probably is a cope about how fragile records and tape can be by comparison. I’ve recently gotten into vinyl, but I don’t need it to be my everything when it comes to audio. I typically regard CDs as my back up archival copy, vinyl and tape based formats are the “fun” and “nostalgic” formats (they’re also good for listening to a record straight through), and streaming is the convenience format (supplemented by rips from my optical discs, which is part of the reason why I use Apple Music for streaming over Spotify). Well, really, I usually download most music locally to my phone, so I’m not technically “streaming” at that point, more “renting for a monthly fee”.
I don’t need vinyl or tape to be my endgame or to be my archive standard (that’s what CDs are for, and the loudness war goes back to the vinyl days, to be fair), they’re the fun format for when I want to sit down and listen to music (or maybe when I want to hear something from the past that’s new to me). I’m not nearly as fussy about vinyl as I am CDs.
@mariteaux The only real failure point I can think of for a (mass-manufactured) DVD is the transition between the two layers (assuming it's dual-layer in the first place). Doesn't mean it doesn't happen--that's well-documented, but I don't think it's an epidemic.
@@danthemainman1 I prefer cassettes to vinyl because they're easier to store and play, but I own both. The fact that I have to transfer them instead of just being able to rip them is a definite downside to me, since I keep a big lossless library and mostly listen through that. I also just don't have particularly great gear for either format. Anything I want to really keep in the collection, I go with on CD, but they're all fun in their own little ways. My interest in vinyl is mostly older albums or albums with a demonstrably better master than on CD (Stadium Arcadium by RHCP is my perennial go-to example). I also can't stand flipping records after three songs; some records just do not work well when you've only comfortably got 18 minutes a side.
If anything all physical media fans are on the same team. The industry as whole especially movie and video games want nothing more to kill disc media so they have full control of their content that they can charge you monthly for and be able to take it away.
@@Monkey6624 I think that's a separate issue to which formats I personally prefer to own, but sure, physical ownership is important.
I've been collecting CDs since about 1981. The only problems I've had were caused by leaving them in a car during summer or dropping them on concrete. No problems even with burned discs.
Since 1981? Wow, what was your first CD? Mine was 1986...ELO "Out of the blue" Japanese double. Cost $56 then.
Funny you mention Warner Archive dvd’s at the beginning of the episode - i probably have about a thousand in my collection, and i’ve only had problems with discs that come in boxed sets, and mainly slim case ones. If you have a WA disc and there’s mot an Archive Collection logo across the top, it’s likely the thing will freeze up towards the end, usually about 3/4 of the way through. I’ve had to go to VHS to find such titles as Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo because i cant find a DVD copy that doesn’t lock up.
Those aren't Warner Archive, just standard Warner.
Oops, sorry, i didn’t know that.
hmm... I going to have to check Firesign Theatre discs now. That would stink if there was an issue.
Here's my personal experience: Most CD's we own are fine. We have about a dozen made by Nimbus in the late 1980's ranging from perfect to fairly bronzed. The few really bronzed ones we have are all "It plays .... just!" once the CD player finds the ToC. A couple of the "just!" discs won't rip properly in the computer. But so far, they all seem to be as bad as they're gonna get - none have gotten worse even after owning some for several years or more. Everything else is fine unless it's badly scratched - and almost all of our CD's are second hand, so we do get the odd dud. The one disc I ever saw with genuine rot was a friend's copy of Heart's 1985 album (was purchased new in 1986 but was useless by 2003) and he couldn't explain it. It was the only rotting CD we'd both ever seen at the time - and, for me, to this day.
Further comment: Often any CD singles (or albums) I've had issues with have been 'clean' with no coloured 'labels' on them. (Just plain print, and often the print is in the same places where the skips can be heard more. IE more print, more interference or skipping; especially where the bigger print can be). It seems more light can be seen through these sometimes and you can see the 'print' though the disc more than those with full colour or non-clear ones. Just my observation.
Only ever had CD-Rs and some magazine discs die on me, where the data layer would start to look all flakey and struggle to load files. Any pressed CDs though, and I own a couple hundred at this point, all flawless, aside from heavy copy protection some of them got (Warner in particular looooved encrypting their discs here in Europe), they all play perfectly fine. Mostly 90s / 00s, but a few 80s ones also (and newer ones obviously work also)
Oh duce, I still have some of white memorex discs!
THE CD r bronzing issues was a manufacturing issue primarily with CDR made by Memorex circa 99 to 2006. Primarily with the purple label Memorex manufacter disks 2001 to end of production 2005 but sold till 2007. Those did max burn of 40 to 48x, these I had one 50 pack spindle and at least 10 were brozed out of the spindle. Out of those 3 suffered disk rot due to poor manufacturing. Most of my burn CDs mix tape style of that era are playing OK. Other brands with the issue from that time period would be khypermedia, TDK, Sony and image (sp) disks. Khypermedia did have more issues with the CD rws. Biggest manufacturing issue was with a library browered CD of a 60s compilation, that cracked in the center made by the English company mentioned here. DVDs only disk that was defective out of the box was blazing saddles 25th anniversary DVD bad manufacturing .
I can personally vouch for the warner dvd pressings being spotty, as I have 3 separate titles hit with it, all dual layer, one double sided and dual layer, and they all fail at the layer swap
Mental break? Must be eating without a table.
Patti Austin enjoyer!
In my not so big collection (~250 CD's) only one disc is rotted (turned to goldish color) - Propaganda / A Secret wish from 1984 / CID 126 - made in UK
Second strange damage I have, one disc where paint is dropping off from unplayable side. (Wendy&Lisa album) Virgin - CDV 2444 version
I had received a bunch of "PDO/MPO" bad pressings lot where a good 15% are just destroyed due of poor storing and/or fragile nature of those CD Bronzing issues. Thoses were the only CD's that comes to my mind when they won't read properly.
The only other CD, more recent, that were unable to read at a certain point are either CD-R's or bad pressings from the manufacter (Unreadable after some tracks, no scratches)
The rest of my 1000's+ of CD just looks & runs fine.
This was the ONLY time I'd kinda wished I had more than one UK PDO title. So few of them made it across the Atlantic.
@@OddityArchive If you want, i could send one or two CD that got damaged by such issues. I did throw however quite a few as i usually don't keep them neither in my main nor reserve collection.
Might take you up on that. Drop me a line at oddityarchive@gmail.com
Absolutely love Alan Parsons Project and Dire Straits. I have mostly CDRs (my friend had one from 2000) and Tears For Fears CDs. One was notorious for having a short life span but all of them from the 90s-now are good. One was a burnt cd that is my stepdads thats gone gold over time but it plays fine.
Only a live Faithless gig cd had playback issues over the years but I think its because it was played alot haha. Great video as always.
When you bought your first CD player in the 80s it was THE LAW to buy:
Alan Parsons project
Brothers in arms
Mike Oldfield tubular bells
@@robturner3065 tubular belllls! I have that on vinyl
@@PlutoPebble sounds great on vinyl! I probably should have added dark side of the moon to that list
@@robturner3065 i dont have that one just mostly TFF ones
in my own experience with CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray’s, it’s not what you can see that can ruin your disc, it’s what you can’t see.. (but i am little vision impaired so it MIGHT have something to do with it.)
I smiled a bit when you said that first CD was from around Nov-Dec 2000- I was born in November of 2000 :) I'm also curious if you ever used WinMX back in the day? No one I've ever talked to ever really used it or has heard of it but it was my family's choice for P2P downloads. I'm a bit convinced we might be holding onto some lost media on those CD-RWs from back in the day.
Don't remember WinMX at all. Of course, my P2P days ended around 2000/2001.
I have various cds from my pops i thought they were a lost cause because they skipped on any device with cd playback including a new cd burner, but i bought a cheap blu ray player and they all work just fine, what could be the reason, do lasers on bd players are better?
My first burned CDs were burned back in 1999 when we got our first burner, 10x Acer from Best Buy. Now I wanna go try out all that old porn I used to wasted CDs with lol
Just as a curiosity, my old or even broken cds from the school era have been successfully read by a discman with a strong antiskip system. Even when my cdrom drive was unsuccessful at ripping the same cd.
Alas, computer CD drives aren't what they used to be. Even some of the pricier ones can have a lousy buffer. Bizarrely enough, my cheapie spare $10 drive is the best with reading and writing CD's/CD-R's/CD-RW's.
@@OddityArchive looks it's the modern norm. a plain old dvdrom i have (which is about 17-18 years old) is the only dvd reader which was able to read dvd R discs i burned in the 2005-6-7 era. traxdatas. should tell you something about quality of dvdrw drives. :/
I've noticed that early eighties cd's were manufactured with much better quality and did not suffer from any loudness wars. And the sound of the early pressings were way better than records and even had the analog sound retained in the recording. But as time went on manufacturing and studio quality started getting worse and worse. Music today sounds terrible compaired to 80's and early 90's. I've even heard true cd collectors will go out of their way to collect original cd pressings from the 80's and not remastered versions. Remastered doesn't always mean better because remastering usually means the sound has been changed a little and it is enough of a change that most collectors notice this change and don't like it and prefer the sound of the original pressing before it ever got remastered.
disc rot is very interesting... I collect demo CDs from Japan, and it's a very common thing you'll see where CDRs from 2011-2012 are completely unreadable, or barely readable. I believe it's certain manufacturers that were the main problem in this case though. Otherwise most CDRs are doing OK. Early-mid 2000s stuff is still doing ok generally, haven't had much outright unreadable. mid/late 2000s - early 2010s CDRs are very hit or miss, scariest to get without a doubt. Would much rather get a rare CDR from 2000 than 2011, much more likely to rip fine.
Stuff from the mid-2010s up to now are still to be determined I guess.
edit: wrote that above while watching and yeah per the ending portion, think most actual actual urgent thing for rot is more often bad manufacturing. on the average most CDRs are doing fine if stored properly.
For some reason I've had certain brands of CD-R in the past that have just refused to read on a certain disc drive, yet work flawlessly on another.
I feel I should mention as someone who HAS had issues with a fair few (not a lot) PDO UK CDs. Most of those affected have been CD Singles, from around 1987/1988/1989, but some have been albums from this period also. The CD Singles mostly affected (I have found) have been on the those produced for the UK CBS and UK Epic labels; in particular those produced with the cardboard slip cases, as opposed to proper plastic cases. There have been some albums, some, but not all, of them in 'Fat' double CD cases; these have been affected a lot less than the singles have been. I've not had any issues with any prior to this or really post this period; I'd think the latest is probably around 1990, perhaps? [I've had more issues with 'clouding' DVDs, to be honest, but that's not the issue being raised/discussed here.] The main issues with the PDO CDs have been bronzing and skipping. Although, I've had some which have been highly browned (or bronzed) and they have surprisingly been fine! So it isn't always possible to tell immediately.
I wonder if it's connected to paper/card acidity?
@@robturner3065 This could be so, I believe I read that this was the case somewhere some years ago.
Interesting video. You must have better quality CDs than me. Many CDs I have bought before 2000 were notoriously dusty, smudged, scratched and skipped a lot. I was to blame as most cheaper players made before around 2000 had low quality CD players which skipped a lot. I remember several CD's where after track 8 it was skip, skip, skip. I also find some car CD players do this. I blame low quality Chinese made CD players too. Some budget CD's made by Disky (Netherlands) were alos very low quality falling apart after 50 plays. A lot of "trend" artists and particularly artists aimed at poor demographics like Rappers and Reggae, have cheaply made CDs which rot and fall apart easily. There was also a scandal in 1987/88 with early CD singles falling apart and rotting easily.
Coming from the UK, my eye did twitch when you put up a caption describing The Jets as Tongan due to having "Tongan heritage"
Overe here, your nationality is based on where you were born and/or raised, not where the boat your family stepped off came from. The Republic of Ireland extend Irish citizenship to any children and grand children of people born on the _island_ of Ireland. This means that people born in Northern Ireland have both British are Irish citizenship whether they want it or not and their children and their children's children have at least Irish citizenship. I'm not sure if the UK extends citizenship like that, which is weird being a British citizen by birth.
But to my British arse, they're only Tongan if they were actualy born and/or raised in Tonga. If Minnesota is the only home they've known, they're Minnesotan and therefore American.
Plastic paddies have made me very sensitive to that sort of thing.
I just threw that in for the "well, ekschually..." crowd. The Jets are for all intents and purposes American--I'm pretty sure all the (then-)kids were born in Minnesota. Only reason they'd really crossed my mind at all was when I saw one of them passed away recently.
Interesting comment, I don't know if you've noticed but the UK is currently falling apart precisely because every little group wants to be anything but British, English, etc.
For context although I qualify as a "plastic paddy" I don't hold dual nationality
@@robturner3065 "Interesting comment, I don't know if you've noticed but the UK is currently falling apart precisely because every little group wants to be anything but British, English, etc."
No, it isn't.
"For context although I qualify as a "plastic paddy" I don't hold dual nationality"
How would you qualify as a Plastic Paddy?
@@GeoNeilUK I am the grandson of an Irish national, making me eligible for my plastic passport.
As for the uk extending nationhood by proxy there are the interesting cases of the Jamaicans who settled here prior to independence as British subjects, yet effectively becoming stateless and having to fight for the right to stay in the following decades
@@robturner3065 "I am the grandson of an Irish national, making me eligible for my plastic passport."
Why do you refer to an Irish passport as a plastic passport?
"As for the uk extending nationhood by proxy there are the interesting cases of the Jamaicans who settled here prior to independence as British subjects, yet effectively becoming stateless and having to fight for the right to stay in the following decades"
Now, this is what makes you a septic brain. You see a British person existing and you come in to needle them for no other reason than their national origin.
I say septic brain because it tends to be Americans in general and left wing Americans in particular who do this, usually by raising events in my country's history or actions by my country's government and holding me _personally_ responsible for it.
It's especially galling from Americans who should probably take a look at their own country's history and consider what they're _personally_ responsible for by the standards they judge British people.
It's even more galling coming from the American Left as they often talk about British people in ways that if you were to speak about any other group, they would call you a bigot.
the disc PS5 doesn't play audio CDs
That's because Sony removed that functionality.
@@foxhack5011 Shocker