Has anyone ever experienced degradation of their music CDs from just aging ?
News going around 10yrs ago said that CDs would not last long.
“Has anyone ever experienced degradation of their music CDs from just aging ?
News going around 10yrs ago said that CDs would not last long.”
The longevity problem with CDs is another one of those issues which stirs endless controversies. It should be noted in any case that the OEM music Cd is fundamentally different in composition and fabrication from the CD you burn on a personal computer’s CD-R. The OEM has the pits and lands physically pressed into the material, whereas the CD you burn in your CD burner drive has the data burned into a layer of inorganic or organic dye backed by metallic layer. The data decomposes as the organic or inorganic dye decomposes and as the metallic backing corrodes. The OEM data should be considerably more durable given the way in which it is physically pressed into the material of the disc.
Interestingly, we have ordinary copies of music CDs burned in a CD-RW drive which have faithfully endured some 15 years of baking hot and freezing cold temperatures inside an automobile.
To make things more interesting, the new M-Disc optical discs claim a 1,000 year plus life span. Your CD-RW or DVD-RW drive burns the data making pure carbon and does not have the metallic backing which can corrode and cause data failures. The M-Disc is semi-transparent. The company features a video where they dip the M-Disc into liquid nitrogen, bake the M-Disc in a dish of lasagna in an oven, wash and scrub off the lasagna, and read the disc without a problem.
Has anyone ever experienced degradation of their music CDs from just aging ?
Yeah, I've had a couple die on me. My copy of Monty Python's The Last Rip-Off (or somesuch) only lasted a few years. Looking at it, you can see something's not quite right.