Semi OT/ CD Damage

[Neophone]

Folks,

I was going through some older CDs over the past few days and I've found a few more suffering from Bronzing. A Living Era one was in the bunch (CD AJA 5008, "Ruth Etting, Ten Cents a Dance". Fortunately it was just beginning to turn so I was able to up-load everything to my computer. WHEW!

Keep an eye on your music collection on modern media-it's just as fragile if not more so.

Regards,
John

[WDC]

John, you've pointed out a severe problem of which most users are not aware of. And, of course, the industry does not want the consumer to know this.

Many people even don't know that the upper (printed) side of each CD is actually the most vulnerable one because it's just a thin layer of lacquer where the lower is a relatively thick base of polycarbonate. The recorded information is directly under the reflection layer which covers it. So, a scratch in this area does really harm the disc.

Signs of aging are mostly to this reflection layer which mostly consists of a silver alloy. This is a severe problem as the silver starts to oxidize as soon as exposed to air. Some discs are not really made well and the silver will tarnish from the edge where the lacquer it often not fully protective.
Other problems are react with the reflective layer and the lacquer or the color that was used to print on the CD.

Recordable media is even different where we are faced with the same problems plus the chemical instability of the recording dye which holds the pits and lands instead of the pressed surface. Plain sunlight is pure poison to them.

Btw. as we are talking about deterioration. Some people like to keep their stuff on USB flash drives or SD cards. Such media is not designed for long-time storage. That means, the data will have likely vanished after 3-10 years.

I have been very lucky so far and only experienced a very few losses of media which I always could obtain again. Today I keep anything important on the hard drive. With CD's I normally avoid the .mp3 format and rather use .flac which allows me to preserve the 1:1 CD information at a storage space of 40-70%. And keeping your data redundant is of the very same importance!

Last week I got myself an external RAID 1 twin-drive which does this job automatically. If one drive ever fails, the second one will continue to work and I'll still have my data.

[Neophone]

Norman,

Thanks so much for the detailed info. The music industry sold us on the CD format by claiming its indestructibility, which we all know, today, is untrue. There really isn't any one way to permanently retain and protect one's collection of music I think. At least if you scratch a record you can still play it-but those CDs very often become completely unplayable if scratched or bronzed.

Regards,
John