OFF: CD Rot

[Henderson Keith]

Hey Folks...

Well, this is in a way on-topic, but only coincidentally.

So, I put on my Virgin (1989) Quark, Strangeness, and Charm CD on the other
day, and discovered to my horror, that it is 'going bad.'  I don't know much
about the CD rot phenomenon (as I've never had this happen before), but I
suppose this must be it.  It's got a heap of crackly noise at the outset
during the first bit of SotA, but that quickly dies out when the real song
kicks in.  But then it slowly creeps back toward the end of the album,
starting again around Days of the Underground.  Never gets as bad as the
first two minutes, but it's enough to be distracting.  And the noise is
louder when the music is louder, and vice versa.  It seems strange that it
appears to creep in from the edges on both sides, but in non-uniform way.  I
mean, the noise propagates just a tiny distance in from the center ring (the
beginning) through (apparently) the 'Table of Contents' and the first two
minutes only.  But because QSC is 'short' (42 minutes or so), it has a wide
ring of unused disc space, and the 'rot' seems to have already crept from
the far edge across this empty zone into the last cm or so of actual music.
Or am I reading too much into this pattern?

Bummer that it's QSC, a rather rare disc, but not so tragic as I believe I
have a Griffin copy back in the US in storage.  But anyway, was just curious
as to whether anyone else had problems with this particular disc, or else
Virgin CDs of the same era.  This one is rather 'early generation' of CDs
and suppose that the quality/durability of more recent discs against things
like CD rot has been improved.  The only other disc I had problems with was
the Dovetail "Pungent Effulgent" (Ozrics) which (like many of those old PDO
discs) simply became unreadable by any player.  I forgot to check to see
whether this one was also a PDO disc.

Anyway, out of 3,000 discs or so that I've owned, to have one go 'south' is
not such a terrible thing.  But I hope that I don't suddenly get a bunch of
them rotting out as all those I bought in the late 80s get to be 20 years
old.

OK, back to regular programming...

Grakkl (FFA)