Has the quality of recordable CD’s and the drives that burn information on them declined since becomming widely available? I have various computers which various burners and eventually the audio on these disks gets corrupted and they become unlistenable. Having said that; Are CD’s or DVD’s a viable form of archivial storage?
Hell no.
Taiyo Yuiden. All you need to know.
Older CD-R discs were of a high, almost archival quality, but consider that burners were also expensive. They weren’t common in home or office computers; folks in the mid-1990s weren’t using them to burn copies of CDs or archive warez, but instead business or photographic archive records.
You may want to take a look at this thread from last year:
Long-term computer data storage - don’t say tape!