The Bad News

[stevers]

Now you're not going to like this. No, not at all.
CDs go off with time (please refer to my previous post CD - seedy and Completely Dreadful)
I brought a Revox A77 back from Blighty (£120 on EBay), cleaned the heads and listened to a tape copy I'd made of a Nimbus CD (Vaughan Wiliams, NIM5019) recorded in June 1984.
I bought and copied the CD the same year. The CD exhibits all the appalling colouration I've being binding on about while the tape (apart from a bit of print through, not surprisingly) sounds fine. A bit tizzy but acceptable after a glass or two.
I suggest you all start looking for Revox's and record your precious CDs before melt down.
Don't buy shares in the 'transfer your old tapes/LPs to CD.com'
and please don't try to tell me that a tape recording acts as a low pass filter-it doesn't.

[Cobra2]

- I have kept a couple of Nakamichis, and my self-recorded tape-collection from the 80's

Arne K

[I_Forgot]

Originally posted by stevers
Now you're not going to like this. No, not at all.
CDs go off with time (please refer to my previous post CD - seedy and Completely Dreadful)
I brought a Revox A77 back from Blighty (�120 on EBay), cleaned the heads and listened to a tape copy I'd made of a Nimbus CD (Vaughan Wiliams, NIM5019) recorded in June 1984.
I bought and copied the CD the same year. The CD exhibits all the appalling colouration I've being binding on about while the tape (apart from a bit of print through, not surprisingly) sounds fine. A bit tizzy but acceptable after a glass or two.
I suggest you all start looking for Revox's and record your precious CDs before melt down.
Don't buy shares in the 'transfer your old tapes/LPs to CD.com'
and please don't try to tell me that a tape recording acts as a low pass filter-it doesn't.

What are you smoking? I think you'd better stop...

I_F

[pinkmouse]

Originally posted by stevers
...and please don't try to tell me that a tape recording acts as a low pass filter-it doesn't.

It might if the heads are not aligned properly, or the same as the machine that made the recording.

[eVITAERC]

This is why a lot of CDs are being ripped onto HDDs? Even though the proposition that any "aging" in these CDs wont get corrected with the ECC check is fishy to begin with.

[audio-kraut]

The CD exhibits all the appalling colouration

Must be either the cheese or the wine....

I have directly compared several cd's (some remastered) with their lp counterpart.
Some of the original cd's are dreadful - cut off below 100Hz and 10000Hz. Most re mastered cd's can hold their own sound wise against a lp, but have the benefit of 0 surface noise.

I'm not aware of any cd colouration beside what I mentioned above.

[stevers]

Originally posted by audio-kraut



Must be either the cheese or the wine....

I have directly compared several cd's (some remastered) with their lp counterpart.

I'm not aware of any cd colouration beside what I mentioned above.

I'm really sorry that audio kraut (you'd get prosecuted for having a name like that in the UK BTW) can't hear any CD colouration. What sort of programme material do you listen to ?

How old were the CDs you were listening to?

As I understand it (and it is, rarely, possible for me to be wrong) there is no error correction/checksum on CDs so why should we assume the medium will maintain 100% integrity with time.
Bear in mind that, certainly in the early days, the technique for pressing and coating CDs was at the limit.
Anyone who has tried using CDROM as a computer backup material will have (or is going to have) a disasterous data loss one day - OK a writeable CD is technically different from a pressed audio CD but software on commercially pressed CDROMs also goes unreadable.
Elsewhere on this forum the dire effects of 'digital clipping' have been discussed and would seem to be more aurally unpleasant than their analogue equivalent. I can't see why random scrambling of the bits on a CD shouldn't have a similar deleterious effect.


Incidentally the tape deck I used for the comparison shows no detectable difference switching between input and recorded sound. The tape was originally recorded on an A77, not the same one of course.

[Christer]

There has been report of so called CD bronzing, a physical deterioration of the media. So far, I think this has only been reported to happen with CD pressed at one, or perhaps a few, particular plants, one of them in England, during certain years when these plants used a different method and/or material composition than the others. There has been a lot of discussion about the lifespan of CDs. While CDRs have been claimed and estimated to last at least 50 years for some silverlayered models and up to 200 years for Kodad goldlayered, the correpsonding estimate for pressed CDs, which use an aluminium layer, was somewhere between 10 and 20 years. I still haven't heard of anyone getting problems with old CDs apart from scratching etc. or the aforementioned bronzin problem.

Once in a while I bring out the first two CDs I bought and which are now over 19 years old, to see if the are getting aged. Prompted by this thread, I just did so again. There is absolutely no visible deterioration, apart from very minor hints of scratching. To check the data integrity, I ripped the first and last track on one of them and the last on the other with EAC. I used the highest quality setting and EAC worked very fast, encountering no problems at all. No errors were reported and the track quality was reported as 99.9 % in one case and 100.0 % for the others. That doesn't necessarily mean an ordinary CD player will not have problems with these disks, but at least the data is there, fully readable.

Contrary to previous claim in this thread, there are two levels of error correction on audio CDs. In addition to this, the data is cleverly distributed to minimize the risk of losing consecutive samples.

However, we still don't know how long CDs last, and their life is easily cut short by accidental mishandling. It is thus not a bad idea to rip at least the most precious ones in the collection and store on data CD/DVD as backup. Store several backup copies if your paranoid, and try storing them under ideal conditions (dark, right temperature and humidity). Regularly make new backups of the backups if you are worried.

I can see no point at all to use analog tape as backup for a medium which already was digital from the start.

[dnsey]

However, we still don't know how long CDs last, and their life is easily cut short by accidental mishandling.<SNIP>try storing them under ideal conditions (dark, right temperature and humidity).

I think that's quite significant.
I had a couple of (newspaper giveaway) CDs loose in the car a while ago, duing a cold spell. Within a couple of weeks the humidity had got to them - the silvered layer had deteriorated badly, and they were completely unplayable. It seems likely that similar deterioration could easily take place on a smaller scale over time under ordinary domestic conditions.
At least there's not much which will render vinyl completely unusable

[seoman]

Once ripped and stored on harddisk it is very easy to store and keep your material save.

A 400GB hardisk is completely copied in an hour!
And with a failure rate of 1bit every hundreds of billion Bytes.
It must be the absolute safest way! Cause those faillures are easily repeared due to the operating systems file structure.

And if you still don't trust it. You just have to buy a mirror disk.
With the current pricing of HDspace at aprox. 0,4$ / 740MB
A save copy will still cost you less than a dollar!
You don't even have to try that with tapes!

Regards Simon