Who has experienced a "pitted" CD?

[spidey07]

When the CD came out it was a god send. Play it over and over and over again, no degradation in quality. That was what was so incredible about the CD. It was an optical media and the act of reading the info did not take away from the recording. It was the bee-knees.

That was/is great!

But in the early 90s reports came in on "pitting" or the fact that that the CD was not so infallable as once believed. The WWW wasn't a big thing back then and the "I read", "I heard", "I know", "I'm absolutely certain (thanks to google without actuall experiencing) became commonplace.

So - who has had a CD go bad due to dissolution of the foil?

 

[Slammy1]

I'd heard people say they could repair them with car wax. I had a DVD do that, but the worst I did to a CD was crack it. All recorded media has a life expectancy. iirc, CDs are around 25 years.

 

[venkman]

This was also a problem with LaserDisc IIRC and recently has been found to occur on some Blu Ray discs.

 

[Rubycon]

I've had several from the 80's. Dire Straits Brothers In Arms (original release, 1985) was one. Still have the original disc and it's unplayable in most players. Hold it up and it lets light through like a cheese grater.

 

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: Rubycon
I've had several from the 80's. Dire Straits Brothers In Arms (original release, 1985) was one. Still have the original disc and it's unplayable in most players. Hold it up and it lets light through like a cheese grater.

That's exactly what I'm talking about. You hold it up to the light and it looks like a freaking cheese grater.

 

[Old Hippie]

So - who has had a CD go bad due to dissolution of the foil?

A few. Using them in the car seems to accelerate the destruction.

 

[Oyeve]

Being an early adopter of the cd format I have tons of degraded cds. Pink Floyd-Dark side of the moon was the first to go, next was Pops in space. A lot of cds that didnt have art on the top of the disc basically eroded. I treat my cds like gold and was extememly pisssed when this happened. Fortunately, I also had good players that played them. Also fortunately, I was an early adopter of CDR so I made backups as soon as I could. THIS is one of the major reasons I still prefer my vinly records to their cd counterparts. Plus, vinly just sounds better IMO.

 

[Modelworks]

The foil I sometimes get problems with, mainly cheap cds.

I remember seeing a nbc show when cd's first came out, the guy from philips was writing all over the top of them with crayons, saying and look they still play.

wowing the audience.
He never mentioned the bottom, scratches, etc.


This is something only for the extreme cases where you simply must have a cd back.

You can use an iron at its lowest setting to evenly heat a cd.
If you do it properly eventually the metal layer will seperate from the polycarbonate.

What you will have then is a very thin sheet of metal that is a perfect image of the orginal media. Only problem now is that its too thin to put in a player , it will wobble when playing.

I have used a clear spacer that usually comes in a cakebox of cd.
Placing that over the metal layer and then very very carefully bonding the two back together with cyanoacrylate. Pressing it hard till dry.

The cd was readable and worked for about 6 times before it warped to the point it wasn't readable anymore.

Of course you risk destroying your cd drive should the disc come apart at 48x speed

 

[hemiram]

I have some CDs from the very beginning of the format, and some still are perfect, but about 20% or so have problems with "pitting" or "pinholing" I've burned copies of them, and had to replace one disc, I couldn't find one track,
the only one I really cared about, anywhere, so I grabbed a copy I found online for a reasonable price.

I have CDR's from 1994 that so far, have no issues. If they played then (That was iffy at first), they play today. So far.

 

[spidey07]

The ones I've had with pitting or pinholing were mainly from the early 90s.

I don't know if it matters but a lot of them were my favorite discs that had been played 100s if not more hours.