Do all the very early CDs from the early 80’s you have still work perfectly? Do your older burned CDRs and CDRWs work perfectly?
CDRs date back to the early-mid 90’s. Do all your 15-20 year old CDRs work perfectly?
This sitesays unused CDRs may start to “rot” after 10-15 years.
I haven’t kept a stats on them but I have had a ton of CD’s go bad. My oldest store bough CD’s go back to 1995 and still work fine but CD-R’s are much worse. I only expect those to last about 5 years before I need to reburn a new copy. This is for normal use. I don’t know what the failure rate is for carefully archived CD’s is but it is was never intended to last as long as paper or vinyl.
I checked my absolute first ever CD and it still plays just fine. Perhaps it is in good condition because I always make copies of my stuff and don’t play the storebought one, just the copies?
The music CDs I bought before 1986 still play properly.
Music CD’s are fine. All mine still work.
CD-R’s are a bad joke. I had some important Usenet mag scans that I collected and archived on CD-R. Carefully stored in CD Wallets and only touched when I needed to copy them to a new hard drive. Damn things had read errors a few year later. All those months of work collecting those mag scans gone by a worthless CD-R. I salvaged what I could and still curse CD-R’s anytime I think about what I lost.
Any Usenet veteran recalls begging for fills. Someone would post 50 mag scans and eight would never appear on the server. Then you had to beg them to repost the fills or work out trades with someone that had the fills you needed. Getting a complete scan collection was a big deal back then.
I’ve found that CDR longevity seems to be related to the blank stock. Some of the very first CDRs I burned back in the late 90s function perfectly well. I have others that died after only a few months.
The ones that died early deaths were all of the same batch of blank CDs (Memorex, if it matters). Not to bash Memorex… I have some Memorex CDRs that still work fine after 10+ years.
For stuff I want to archive long term I tend to burn multiple copies on blank CD stock from different manufacturers/batch numbers. More than once that practice has saved me.
Bottom line is CDR longevity is a crap shoot.
Same here. It really depends on the brand. There are some generic CDRs I have that started giving me problems after only about five years, even though they were just mainly sitting in a box in the closet during that time.
On the other hand, I’ve had good luck with Maxell, Imation and TDK. In fact I even have a few TDK discs that I’ve kept in my car for a couple years (including several summers in the Texas heat) where they were exposed to the sunlight, and even turned yellow, and still play just fine.
The Library of Congress studied this a few years ago as they began to digitize their collection, and the results were not encouraging. Essentially, the longevity of CDs is completely unpredictable, by brand or price or anything else. It is dependent on the formulation, and the formulations were, and still are changed frequently. I’ll look for a link about this – IIRC it was a story in a PBS or TLC documentary about the LoC.
I’ve had two retail CDs go bad in the last year. They were 15-20 years old.
All of my burned CDs (10-12 years) are good except for those with adhesive labels. Nearly all of those have gone bad and I re-burn the good ones as I find them (I have about 2000 CD-Rs in total). Fortunately, I probably only put labels on 20 or so discs. I expect all burned CDs to be unplayable after twenty years. I have no favorite brand and the dollar store CD-Rs are holding out as well as the Taiyo Yuden brand discs.
This is a marked contrast to what I was promised in the late Eighties. They said that retail CDs would last forever and could not be scratched because of the thick coating. They said that burned CDs were “just as good” as retail ones.
On the other hand, I have vinyl records that are 60 years old. Every one still plays. Some are a bit noisy, but they all work.
Vinyl LPs had a 35 year heyday, and 10" 78rpm records go back to the 1920’s. The CD will be lucky to be around another two years for their 25th anniversary. Numerous other formats have come and gone in the interim. I suppose the majority of people collect music in their twenties and are happy to spend the rest of their lives listening to whatever format was big then. But I have remained a music fan and have had to repurchase in five different formats. I’m not pleased with the prospect of needing to renew all my CDs before I kick.
I have a burnt CD’s from five years ago that work perfectly fine and I keep testing them because I’ve heard the same skepticism on how long they last due to disc rot and other factors I keep testing them and even have just bout every file saved along with a hash sum check file, I have found no errors so far.
I know many people know this, but it’s important to point out that CDs, which are manufactured by punching pits in a reflective aluminium surface are completely different from CD-Rs, which use dyes.
Regular audio cd’s are amazingly tough. I had some in my car throughout the 90’s. Often just lying in the glove box without a sleeve. They always played. Same thing in my office at work. Audio cd’s just lying in a drawer with pencils, paper clips and so on. Never fooled with jewel cases because I played the cd’s every day. They were tough.
It takes a deep scratch on the label side to ruin a regular audio cd.
Related to scratches, audio CDs can be more resilient than data CDs because players will be able to play them even if some of the data is lost. A CD player with good error correction will be able to play severely scratched CDs but at the cost of some of the high frequency content, as it will interpolate lost samples. You can’t do that with a program or a text file.
To clarify my experience, the two retail CDs that have gone bad on me (and there have been no others previous) succumbed to “rot”. That is to say that they were unscratched but the silver backing presumably corroded or flaked off. The flaws were invisible until the disc was held up to a strong light in a dark room.
I have a great many CDs so they don’t all get played often. All are stored inside. I would guess that these bad ones had not been out of the case in five years and less than ten times in the previous decade.
I would agree that the integrity burned CDs is hit-or-miss. Five years is normally expected if they aren’t exposed to strong light. Beyond that is unpredictable. I cannot afford the cost to back my many CDs up to DVD or hard drives. In fact, my DVDs are supposed to be protection against hard drive failure. I distrust the cloud because I fear they’ll hold my data for ransom in order to discourage moving it to lower cost providers, not to mention the possibility that they’ll disappear.
My feeling is that, as long as they are upgraded on a regular schedule, hard drives are safer long term and easier to manage than a box full of optical media.
I have had two or three pressed music CDs start to “bronze” (that is, the metal substrate started to corrode and go from silver to brownish). The problem was largely limited to a specific pressing plant. Wiki article. I have no idea if the CDs are still playable by now as they are up in the loft.
My first CD, Dire Straits “Brothers In Arms” still plays perfectly. Purchased in 1986. All my older CD’s still play properly. I have heard of a phenomenon known as CD rot in which the metalic layer develops pin holes rendering the CD unplayable. Some of my older CDs do have small pin holes but it’s more due to the manufacturing process of early CD’s than that of deterioration.
Here’s a pic of an old audio CD of mine. It’s from 1988 and at some point it developed this huge ‘line’ through the data substrate. It’s *NOT *a scratch, both sides are completely smooth and I’ve always been meticulously careful with them. Don’t know if it developed slowly, but I only noticed it all at once. Thing is, the CD still plays fine! Doesn’t stutter or skip at all. As others mentioned the error correction for audio CDs is pretty resilient.
That timeline would place the birth of the CD around 1989/90, but as the thread title correctly asserts, CDs are ~30 years old right now (i.e. originating in 1982/83, give or take a few months depending on which event one considers the “birth”).
I remember the first time I ever heard a CD: It was Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”, playing in an isolated listening room at the back of an electronics expo in 1983. I got my first CD player a couple of years after that, and still have several CDs I bought at the time. When I’m able to pull them out of storage I’ll report back how they’ve fared.
Several that I have left in my car have become unplayable-the aluminum layer has peeled right of!
Standard commercial CDs (and DVDs/Blu-Ray) have their pits injection molded into the substrate, and then then metal, usually aluminum for CDs, is deposited onto the surface of the molded pits/lands to make them reflective. A UV-cured lacquer is them spun onto the disc to protect the molded data layer.
