Continuing with CDs?

Disintegrating CDs can almost entirely be traced to a Polygram plant in West Germany that, in the 80s, didn't use the correct manufacturing process, causing its discs to deteriorate over time.

did not know this, thanks, see also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_bronzing

Bronzing became a thing again in the last few years with early Blurays, most notably some of Criterion's initial efforts in the format.

i lost some good shit on cd-rs. and yeah a lot of import cds, "mastered by nimbus" bronzed and got shitty.

here in the tropics this happens

disc weevils!?

God, CD-Rs were the other thing cluttering my room...so glad to be free of them

Spotify has mostly weaned me off CDs, but I still buy the odd box and am also slowly buying up all the Italian prog titles I can find on the cheap

Disintegrating CDs can almost entirely be traced to a Polygram plant in West Germany that, in the 80s, didn't use the correct manufacturing process, causing its discs to deteriorate over time.

People keep saying this, and in fairness you did say "almost", but I've had several CDs from the mid-90s go brown/stop working, so this "it was only a specific factory in the late 80s" doesn't add up for me.

Tarfumes misremembered how long the manufacturing problem continued. If you read that Wikipedia link above, it says it continued until the mid-90s, and possibly there were similar problems with one or two other CD pressing plants besides the best-known example in the UK.

But it's not something that affects all CDs from that era, and CDs produced after that will not decay over time, provided you take decent care of them. I have hundreds of CDs from that era (from 1988 to 1993), and some even older ones from the mid-80s, and none of them have suffered from bronzing.

Any problems I've had with CDs have been caused by my own mishandling of them, such as keeping them in a full CD wallet for months... You really shouldn't do that, because if the discs constantly rub against each other they may chafe, which can result in tiny damages in the reflective material inside the disc, which will make some tracks unplayable. Unlike scratches on the outer plastic layer of the disc, the damage in the reflective layer cannot be fixed so that the CD will play again.

Throwing away all the packaging and keeping your CDs in a big plastic wallet strikes me as the worst of all worlds really.

Disc bronzing is different to disc rot, apparently. Same end result but bronzing is almost entirely associated with discs made at the PDO plant in Lancashire in the late 80s - early 90s. Of the first CDs I bought in 1986 that I still have they all seem good as new.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_bronzing

Those PDO discs do seem to have a very high failure rate up to 1993, after that they are fine.

Yeah, but AFAIK disc bronzing is the only thing that can destroy your CDs even if you take good care of them. The other types of disc rot are avoidable.

I have bronzed CDs from 1996. I have never kept my discs in a disc wallet or left them lying around outside the case (maybe overnight if I was playing music with friends, but that wouldn't be the case with these). Just saying.

Never checked out those alternative cases, btw. Still faintly interested, as space is finite (obvs) so I'm just moving more out to the loft / under the spare bed every year.

I've never noticed a CD bronze or rot or disintegrate and we must've had 3,000 go through our hands over the years.

From that wiki link, "The problem is also prevalent with many discs that were manufactured by Nimbus during the late 1980s to the mid 1990s" - yep, the one I can remember being bronzed to fuck from 1996 is Tanya Donelly's Sliding and Diving CD single, which was mastered by Nimbus. And one from 1995 that was PDO - Pulp, Common People.

Most painful victim of bronzing: Disco Inferno's "Summer's Last Sound/Love Stepping Out" EP. I bought three of them over the years until the 5 EPs got released, and every one of them bronzed out.

My second hand copy of that was always bronze. Played ok though I thought.

Apologies for misleading info on poorly-manufactured CDs; I didn't realize it continued into the 90s. Not surprised it wasn't big news at the time, though; surely, the industry didn't want the sustainability of their massive cash cow to be questioned.

The bronzing is interesting because it causes an actual deterioration of the sound, not skipping or refusal to play at all... it sounds like road noise that gets louder and louder on mine.

one of the lamest things is that it seems like laptops are being made w/o CD drives now?

external drives are p cheap though

(xp re noise)

I had a CD that deteriorated like that to the extent it sounded like Merzbow had hijacked the recording studio when they were mastering it. I suspect it was probably a CD-R since it was released on a tiny label in around 2003.

I've got about as many CDs as Sick Mouthy and as you can see I've been quite a bit less lucky with this over the years.

Oddly (?) never had a problem with older CDRs -- I still stumble across plenty for a buck from CDR-only labels last decade that rip/play fine.

And yes, pretty simple to get an external. I have a Samsung Blu-Ray drive for my MacMini, under $100, and it doesn't even need a separate power line -- just plugs directly into a USB connection. As I still get promos and scrounge the used bins as noted, it's a perfect addition.

I won't buy CD-Rs any more after getting 2 duds in a row from Hyped 2 Death.

yeah, i should get one of those external thingies.
and it's true, even when an old CDR seems to be having problems in a CD player (which is rare), I can usually get it to rip to the computer without problems.

I've been lucky with CD-Rs, too; I still have some from 1999 and 2000 that play fine (but I've never stored them in wallets).

Oddly, I did! The story here -- starting around 2000 I (like a lot of other people I suspect) ended up burning any number of mp3s to CDR as they were around, and after a while they all ended up in CaseLogics. In 2010 when I finally made a full switch to an external hard drive for the collection as such, I went back and imported them all in...and they all seemed to import just fine. Haven't removed them again since but hey.

When you burned mp3s to a CD and then ripped them as mp3 again you double compressed them... do they sound okay?

There were a couple of instances where that happened but I actually mostly directed burned them as data discs -- I had a separate player by 2001 or so (may even have been my first DVD player) which read/played mp3s directly. Therefore, no need to compress further.

The first 10 or so Burnt Sugar releases, which are some of my favorite music in the world, were all on CD-R; my copies play fine, but I've considered ripping them to my hard drive in CD quality (I usually rip stuff as 256kbps AAC files, for my iPod).

I would personally advocate for multiple backups of any CDR material

i think you should make at least 10 copies of every CDR/CD you own and send them to friends and family for safe-keeping. also keep one copy in a safe deposit box on CDR and also a digital backup on some sort of external drive and also keep a separate digital copy of every CD on a separate computer from your main computer that runs continuously via its own emergency power source separate from your main power grid (diesel generator, etc.) 24/7. also, commit the CDRs/CDs to memory and hum a little bit from them every day in case you need to duplicate them acoustically on ukelele/banjo/etc if every physical and digital copy is somehow destroyed.

otm

You should back up everything to vinyl. It's the only format that can be played without electricity.

yep as long as there are cactus needles and styrofoam cups we can always listen to those sweet 180 gram lps.

I bought a limited run CDr from Mark Burgess' short lived band Bird and it totally crapped out within a year of purchase. Bummer too, as it features the brilliant guitar work of Yves Altana. But it's essentially unplayable now.

Often you can still extract usable files on a computer even if the CD won't play without skipping.

I've tried. Oh trust me, have I tried.

It does that weird thing where it sounds like rotating static over the music. You know that thing?

vinyl-only releases are super annoying huh

if i don't want the vinyl i have to hunt for the mp3 and i hate hunting down mp3s on shady sites, i hate it so much that i just might buy the vinyl

sorry not completely relevant to the thread but i didn't feel like finding another one

it's just, vinyl is so useless for me. i have a bunch but there are so few circumstances that allow for me to listen to vinyl at home. cds i play in my car, can rip to my laptop and then put on my phone, etc. like if you put out a vinyl-only release i am pretty much only doing the purchase to support you and not to listen to you.

Oddly, I did! The story here -- starting around 2000 I (like a lot of other people I suspect) ended up burning any number of mp3s to CDR as they were around, and after a while they all ended up in CaseLogics. In 2010 when I finally made a full switch to an external hard drive for the collection as such, I went back and imported them all in...and they all seemed to import just fine. Haven't removed them again since but hey.

― Ned Raggett, Monday, February 22, 2016 12:02 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is what I plan to do (seriously) given a Burgess-Meredith-in-the-Twilight-Zone-last-man-alive-in-the-bomb-shelter type scenario. I have thousands - thousands! - of CDRs of things burned from Audiogalazy, Napster, as well as stuff friends have burned for me, friends' bands, mixes, etc, just sitting on spools (and, God help me, "slim" jewel cases) and I know a lot of it isn't replaceable.

My New Year's resolution for the past five years running is "less stockpiling, more listening,' but it's tough to really listen when you're spending half your time cataloging the shit you have already, err, stockpiled. I realize it is a senseless waste of time, but such is the disorder. This is a problem that predates the digital glut: if someone recommends a book to me, I'm the guy who finds it cheap online and buys it that day, despite having a pile of unread books on the nightstand. I guess I figure I will live forever.

I have never done the math on this, but a similarly-afflicted friend once told me that if he started listening to every CD, LP, 7" and cassette he owned TODAY, doing nothing else for the rest of his life and without ever even eating or sleeping ever again, he still wouldn't get to hear everything he owns. A sobering thought, and a comment more on mortality than anything else. Especially fucked up when you realize you are still acquiring more new music every day.

that's true about not having the time to listen, but as a fellow fiend I feel that the real problem is not "I want to hear everything" but "I want to be able to hear anything"

having more and more choices is part of the addiction

Hmmm. That is an important distinction, I guess. Like, if I feel like listening to dub, I can go find a hundred dub albums I bought when I went through a massive phase ten years ago, and hear days of dub without leaving the house (or resorting to streaming). Of course, the problem is, I'm just as likely to find an old dub thread on ILX and be all "I didn't know that got reissued omg need that right now" and down the rabbit hole I go etc etc etc

Even at 33 I'm pretty sure I don't have enough days left to listen to my collection end to end, which causes a bit of internal concern every now and then when I bring home another haul of cheap CDs.

I still mostly buy on CD, preferring to to vinyl for price and versatility and to buying MP3s on the basis I'd rather have a physical copy if it's costing about the same. Until recently I didn't have a reliable CD player, so all of those CDs were being ripped straight to the computer and iTunes used as a convenient jukebox - if nothing else it gives access to the half of my collection that would have to be dug out of crates to play, so otherwise forgotten about.

I got a reliable second hand CD player before christmas, and started actually listening to CDs again. The input to the (cheapo) amp was a little distorted, but otherwise a reasonably satisfying experience. On a whim at the weekend I went into Richer Sounds and upgraded my amp, turntable and speakers and what a difference it's made! Everything I've listened to on CD since has sounded very good, certainly better than the MP3s. I'm even happier with how the vinyl I've listened to sounds, but I think my prime format will remain CD for now. I could do with a better storage solution than I have, though. There's not much space in my flat!

This may be a dumb question, but does the quality of the CD player make any difference whatsoever? Obviously I'm asking as it pertains to sound quality, not durability, looks, etc. I've been using a DVD player for a decade now and it's never occurred to me to upgrade.

I doubt it makes all that much difference, I replaced the old one because it was pretty temperemental as to whether it felt like playing a CD or not on that day. May be differences in the quality of the in-board DAC, I suppose.

I'm not much of an audiophile though, so may be wrong.