This one's an AP story, so I imagine it can be found elsewhere, but it recently ran in my local paper, the "Argus Liar." Here's a link:
http://www.argusleader.com/business/Thursdayarticle2.shtml.
The poor shmuck in the article found rot or 'pinholing' in 15%-20% of his 2000 disc collection. I've been banging the drum about CD rot for years, although my personal experience has shown it to be much less common. It seems to me to occur mostly in discs that were mishandled, but occasionally it seems to stem from a manufacturing flaw.
I have an AC/DC CD from the earliest days of the Compact Disc. I bought it in a batch of discs off a buddy who'd written his name on them all with a Sharpie. I found the
very brief application of acetone would remove the writing without harming the disc, but with the "Back in Black" disc I wasn't quick enough & I took all the top layer off in a patch the size of a nickel. I've since bought a new copy, but I've that disc an experiment to see how long it will take to become unplayable. It tooks very bad but remarkably plays with no audible problems. The thing is riddled with pinholes- with the top layer breached the aluminum is oxidating nicely, but perhaps not as rapidly as one might think (it's not very humid in SD). Every few months I drag it out and play a few tracks and visually examine the progress of the rot.
Has anyone here had the "stones" to go thru their collection carefully to see if they have any bad CDs?
