Disc rot on CDs. It's a really bad problem.

One of the CDs I got for my birthday is having playback issues with constant dropouts and I received it in brand new condition. Another CD I got for Christmas still works, but has visible signs of rot and it's a 2025 release. I guess it got instarot. The only CD I recently acquired that I can say without a doubt is rot free is a Thomas & Friends album called Thomas Songs And Roundhouse Rhythms. It's from 2001, and I purchased 2 new old stock copies with my own money. Both copies are rot free. From now on, I'm limiting the CDs I purchase for certain artists who supervise most of the CD making process. As well as this, I'm saving for a optical drive so I can make backups of my CDs because I'm sick of the lack of quality control on CDs.

 

Do the drop outs occur at any time at any place on the cd or mostly on the last track?
I have some cd's that have bit rot but only self burned ones. At some point i owned a Philips cd burner which uses blank cd's for audio not data and these don't have rot on the last track only cd's burned on a computer.
On original discs i have none that have rot and i own about a 1000 cd's.
I have given this some thought and tried to find out what is causing the rot...it's UV light...plastic reacts with it so the laser can't read the bits correctly anymore.
And if a cd is stored on a shelf in normal daylight for a certain time the light will leak through the top of the cd tray causing only a small spot to be affected.
I found this out many many years ago and i keep my collection in a dark room with a minimum of UV light entering the room.
When i was a kid in the 70's my dad taught me straight away to keep my cassette's always in a dark place, this also counts for cd's.

 

Can you tell if the discs which are "rotting" are pressed or burnt CD-Rs ? Burnt discs are more susceptible to problems like bronzing. I once left a DVD-R uncased near the TV and a year later it was unplayable and the half that was exposed to light was a different colour.

Another factor is how tolerant your CD player is. Some erly ones wouldn't even play CD-Rs.Much as I like the Sony ZS-D55 in my Avatar I have three and CD playback is iffy on all of them. In contrast late model "Walkman" CD players, have always been reliable for me.

 

Almost all of my CDs that are rotting are pre-recorded burned discs, but one of the CDs that is rotting is a pressed CD.

 

I have lots of CDs that have succumbed to rot, some going brown and some having a broken glass effect. All pre-recorded discs. One was an album that would have cost me a lot of money (well, about £60 anyway) to replace but, luckily, it was reissued a few years ago and that enabled me to replace it at a reasonable cost.

 

My first post here.
So which brand of blank cd-r, dvd-r etc. seem to be reliable through out the years? I think that discs made by Tayo Yuden are the best.

 

So like i said in my earlier post, light fucks up your cd's...well the bromite that is in the plastic as a flame/fire retardent of the cd's is actually the real cause....

That browing is the bromite, you could try to RetrObright your cd...

Apparantly the plastic used in older cd's is of a much better quality then nowadays.

 

I have only ever had one CD do the broken glass thing. That was one of the two discs in a shop bought Now 198X set. Annoying though because that double CD cost me around £20 (the price label was still on the case to remind me) and the deterioration happened while the CDs were carefully stored in their case.

 

I had one of those two part CD singles (The Orb, I think) and both discs did it!

 

Hello Guys,
I guess I have been lucky and far as burned discs not playing in older machines I have Pioneers second CD player made and It plays my burned discs !
Sincerely Richard

 

Yes this makes CD a fabulous sounding , ticking time-bomb. It's the fate of the product - no matter which way you slice it.
You have to think about the different types of storage you have as well. get it on HDD if you can if you have stuff on Disc
if it's of value.
My 'cherished' Laserdiscs started getting rot in the 90s. CDs I start to see problems in the early 2000s and now the
manufacturing specs are obviously shite - so this is going to be an ultra disposable product. I also wonder about what they
dump on these modern CD's .. probably an altered MP3 file like many 'promo dj' cd's already are.
I constantly work on archiving my CD collection which is mostly private pressed stuff, CD-r albums
because it's gonna happen and some artists only released on CD during a 25 year period.

I see all those hype videos on youtube about CDs . They are delusional if they think this can be a lasting format.
Turns out 8-track tapes last longer.

 

I love when I get a CD from someone online who said it was Mint and there are micro-specs out of the top layer that chip the paint and the layers
to make dropouts in the CD that you can never fix. This happens often.

 

It exists. But I own literally thousands of them and have had exactly ONE go bad. It was on a Brass Quintet recording on some (not Telarc) surprisingly audiophile oriented label that I no longer recall. I do think it's rare, but I buy VERY few new issue (2020's) era CDs. For me, their pressing quality is the very least of their issues, lol. I do think there is one mitigating fact that they have in common with another illegitimately criticized format, cassettes. Sunlight and humidity is bad for everything but most of all, physical media. I have been fortunate with CD-Rs and Blu-rays as well. (Yes, I do take Vitamin D supplements, occassionally. No, I don't talk like Bela Lugosi...LOL..)

 

I pretty sure the "old CD players wont play burnt discs" theory is a myth. When CD burners first started becoming popular I had no trouble playing the discs in any existing CD players I had. However new CD players from that era where either made deliberately to not play them or had just gotten so cheap they didn't play things slightly out of spec, I suspect the former. The ability to read burnt discs later became a selling point, particularly in the MP3 era.

 

Experious,
The crazy thing is, this Pioneer CD player is 100% original and still works great. I know I need to take it apart and service it. I have the factory service manual, and I was an authorized Pioneer dealer and service shop from the 1980s up until the early 2000s.
Sincerely Richard

 

Not the good ones, anyway! I have a CAL Tercet III (1991-ish) that's a little finicky w/them, but every other (Many of them) Denon/Marantz/Oppo and ASUS inboard/outboard computer recorders /players I own play CD-Rs just fine.

 

Check out this 'solution' for backing up CDs with a 'smartphone' - - it's quite the road to follow - I'd suggest a cheap laptop.

 

Funnily enough, that video had come up in my feed! I had not watched it because, as he also mentioned, I find it hard to imagine someone not having a PC in their house!

 

Most of the instances of alleged "rot" that I see are attributable to things like what's described in this video: