[adprom]

I have a few cd's from the very early 80's now, and several dozen from the mid to late 80's. None of them have gone moldy, they all smell fresh and play great.

Some of the worst cds are those manufactured in the last 5-10 years. They often dont' last. Had an entire BOND boxset that had manufacturing issues and weird patterns on the disc - they were delaminating.

I haven't played a cd in years anyway. All have been backed up with bitperfect copies (verified with accuraterip where possible) to flac. The odd cd had issues - found another cd off a friend etc where possible to get a perfect rip.

[Rclark]

I have yet to have or see a cd "fail" physically. I don't expect it to be a common occurence, especially if well cared for like mine are. Although, I don't discount your story and would be pretty pissed.

[Elizabeth]

Nearly ALL of my 300 Classical CDs are very early ones.
Say 1983 to 1986.
They all sound fine.
Part of the issue is what sort of music?
Some people (seem to) think the only music which exists is Rock.. (lol) so they do not specify it is Rock music which is being compressed to death ...
Jazz seems perfectly fine, new, old, no problems. Ditto Classical.
I have new and old Jazz discs.. They all seem great too.
Agree for Rock it is an artist to artist, disc to disc, recording to recording issue. Some good, some bad. And that more bad than good recent (last ten years or so) releases for compression.

[kevin360]

(Did someone just mention jazz?)

I have plenty of CDs that I bought back in the early 80s - no issues whatsoever with any of them (from a playability standpoint). Most of them sound wonderful, but not all of them. Likewise, I have some recent discs that are atrocious, but not all material these days is compressed. Most of it (what I listen to anyway) sounds great. Take, for instance, what I'm listening to right now - Ed Palermo Big Band's 'Eddy Loves Frank' (I know how Ed feels ), which was recorded in 2009. Here's Regyptian Strut:

[spinner]

 Yes , same here. That rot thing pertains to the dye based recordables I believe 

[Laundrew]

Agree for Rock it is an artist to artist, disc to disc, recording to recording issue. Some good, some bad. And that more bad than good recent (last ten years or so) releases for compression.

I have often considered that new pop/rock releases were more focused on quantity instead of quality. After all, if the majority of users are only listening to music on their iPods or phones why worry about a well recorded CD?

Be well...

[JerryLove]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war


Top is Death Magnetic (released CD)
Bottom is same song from "Guitar Hero"


Above is "Black or White", first from the "Dangerous" album, then "History", then "Ultimate Collection".

Now I need to go run through some of my songs and see if there are less-compressed versions. I didn't realize they were changing DC so much on re-releases.

[Wayner]

Jerry,

Your views of the audio panes seam to actually be "clipped" rather then compressed. If any of you have recorded audio with a digital player, the rule of the game, unlike it's analog counterpart (RTR, cassette), is to have zero red-lines. In other words, if your VU meter goes into the red, you have digitally clipped the recording input. This is not a pretty sound, and tho I'm not sure what happens to the little 0 and 1s, I'm sure it's not good.

I have mastered many recordings to 2 channel with my Tascam DA-30MKII and it is a bitch. The difficulty lies in creating the loudest possible recording without going into the red. It always took me several tries before everything was on the south side of the forbidden zone.

My Cakewalk Pro Audio 9 (real old software, but still good) does have a "normalizer" function to raise the highest point in any recording up to just below the threshold, but in reality, the best way was doing it right on the DAT.

Wayner