CDs... :(

[m_s]

This morning I excitedly dug out two old cds I've not listened to in a few years - Brian Eno's 'Thursday Afternoon' and 'Music for Airports' - and all the stories are true: cds do deteriorate!  Both have oxidised or something, because there are plainly visible little holes in the silver, where I can see through to the other side.  These were the first cds I bought - 'Thursday Afternoon' was the very first, when it came out in 1985.  I heard something on the radio about the effective life of a cd likely being 20 years - this feels a little like the well-known thing about items breaking on the day their warranty ends!

[mouser]

have you tried "exact audio copy" program discussed on this forum to recover them?

i guess if there are holes in them, nothings gonna do much good

well you can just look at them and relive some memories.

[Carol Haynes]

Actually there are a lot of myths going around about oxidising CDs.

Most of the problems seem to have occured either in the early days of CD production when manufacturers were still learning (seems to be your case) or faulty manufacturing - there were various batches of discs produced in Germany and distributed through Europe that highlighted this problem a few years back.

The same is potentially true for DVDs.

However, most manufacturers seem to have fixed the problems quite a few years ago and esitmate CD archive life at 100 years plus.

Not a lot you can do though with CDs which have oxidised to the point of holes!!

I had a number of articles about this issue somewhere - I'll see if I can find them (just hope they aren't on a CD ...  )

[Carol Haynes]

Here are a couple of interesting articles:

This one is an easy description of the problems.

This is a PDF file with a complete (supercomplete) description of possible problems and archiving solutions ....

[clif_notes]

Who's your new avatar Carol?

[m_s]

Oh yeah, Carol's changed!

[Carol Haynes]

Who's your new avatar Carol?

Chosen for our glorious leader