Воскресенье 19 Мар 2006, 23:08

Over the last few years I discovered that some of my CDs have little holes in the silver data layer.
First I thought that these were production errors but I got suspicious when more and more CDs from a certain label, Arcade, were showing these faults. I also had this with older Philips CDs that were made in West Germany.

Recently someone posted on a messageboard that CDs last 100 years. I told my story and was not aware at first that someone already posted almost exactly the same comment. Naming the same problems with CDs of the Arcade label.

So we were on to something. Last week I browsed through my and my mother's collection. And I was horrified at what I discovered: a large part of CDs older than 15 years is showing the same defects: they've all got tiny holes/pieces missing from the data layer!

For my mother, a big Nana Mouskouri fan this was shocking. A large part of her collection of OOP (out of print) CDs have these holes as they are Philips/Polydor CDs older than 15 years.

I discussed this with a friend and he told me that this probably is caused by the oxidation of the aluminium in the CDs.

I did a search on the Internet and can't find much. Most of the Google results are about CD-Rs and their short lifespan, but not about original CDs.

But this article seems to have good info on this problem: audio CD deterioration due to oxidisation and fungal attack

My affected CDs are mainly of these labels: Arcade, Philips/Polydor, Dino, RCA and EMI.

The only solution to save the OOP and other CDs is to back them up to gold CD-Rs that 'really' should hold the data for over 100 years.