I have.
It doesn’t matter how you handle them, or if you even play them at all. It’s not a myth, and “it never happened to me” doesn’t really prove anything.
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Not trying to prove anything. Just explaining why it’s not something I’m personally worried about. YMMV. Maybe I’d reconsider if if there was a superior music storage format to CD available at the consumer level, but so far I haven’t found one. There’s no perfect, risk free format for music, but so far as near as I can see CD has not been surpassed for reliability and quality of reproduction (maybe SACD/DVD/bluray? I dunno how they compare, archivally)
Is this the test where you hold up a CD to the light and see if there are visible pinholes? I have (at least) one like that, although it was still playable as of a few years ago (I hadn’t tried it out again since I copied it to a hard drive). The CD is about 36 years old; I bought it used in 1996. That’s before I heard about CD rot, so for all I know, the pinholes were there when I bought it, or for that matter when it was pressed ca. 1987. In other words, I’m not sure it’s a test of anything unless I was there doing QA when they pressed it.
I have had DVD-Rs (which I used for storage in the days before >1TB hard drives) go unreadable, but even when I burned them I figured they weren’t permanent.
AIUI, it’s a chemical process that applied to certain discs that had a silver substrate - they effectively tarnished. I also have a few discs that have the pinholes you describe, but I think this is a different thing - they were there from the beginning on mine. And the neat thing about CDs is that the pinholes didn’t make any difference when I ripped or played those discs - the error-correction algorithms that CD systems use are pretty amazing.
Yep, same here. But I’m still impressed by how many 25 year-old CD-Rs I have are still readable - only one or two out of stacks and stacks of them have had the dye degrade.
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I wish I could find it now, but there was a survey that showed only about 50% of the people buying vinyl now actually own record players. Maybe it’s fans buying a rare collectible, maybe they plan to buy a turntable at some point, or maybe it’s an awful lot of re-sellers/flippers making a buck.
I predict cds will make a comeback. Part of the allure of collecting vinyl back in the 90’s was that you’d find rare gems for cheap in the thrift store, now it’s all easy listening garbage (or thrift stores having “boutique” areas with used vinyl priced like what you’d pay for a new reissue), but you can still find cool cds for a dollar.
Believe it or not, no. I remember finding out back in 1987 that a cd pressing was cheaper than vinyl, for a 1000 pieces. It has to do with mastering/cutting/plating, which is the biggest cost in vinyl pressing.
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I remember around the turn of the millennium, there was a class action lawsuit over the price of CDs being too high (might’ve been this?).
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