CD rot

[clhboa]

A lot of people talk of cd rot(a topic that was prevalent in the early 90's but has been making a comeback). I personally have never had a cd deteriote. While I agree that cds' aren't indestructable, I wonder how much things like temperature or humidty play into this. I have found pinholes in some of my discs but they have always played fine and I have never noticed that they were becoming worse. I have over 2000 cds' and have lived in humid Ohio, and dry New Mexico and somewhere in between Colorado. Anybody got any ideas?

[MacGyver]

it's the same occasional phenomonon as "Laser Rot" laserdiscs are casted in two halves. the halves are pressed together with a hot adhesive. it is much the same with CDs. anyway, occasional goof ups in manufacture would result in an inconsistent adhesive layer wich had microscopic gaps that allowed air to come in contact with and eventually oxidize the refective aluminum layer resulting in a wide range of playback artifacts from colored speckles in the video, to an actual unplayable disc. fortunately, this is a realitively uncommon phenomona. still, there have been known cases, such as the LD pressing of the movie "Willow" where there is no known copy that doesn't suffer some degree of laser rot...

[Scorpion8]

I've never heard that term, and no CD's aren't indestructible, but I also know that computer store bulk 1000-cd/$2.99 packs don't last very long before the digital encoding fades enough to make them unreadable. I've had to mkae several copies for my auto-collection as the keep fading off after a few seasons of being left in the truck. So I keep the originals in my safe, and keep making new copies and tossing them when they go bad.

[Acoustic]

I remember getting CD's back in the '80's that when new had the pinholes in them (Brand X- Unorthodox Behavior was one of them, wish I still had that disc*fit*). I just looked at the first Swing Out Sister disc and there are numerous see through holes in it from that era. Still works though.