h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I was always told that vinyl is really fragile. You can hold a CD while eating greasy food, leave it on the side (out of its' case for a couple of weeks, use it as a drinks coaster, spill said drink (and wipe it off), drop the CD, tread on it, pick it up and there's a decent chance it will still play fine.

I've just finished doing my research for this one.

I have a copy of 'Hatful Of Hollow' pressed in 1987. Still plays fine. Although I'm not playing it at all since people in the know told me it's worth a fair few bob. Not bad for something that I half-inched from the University's CD library.

B

The CD 'perfect sound, abuse it and it'll still play fine' myth was busted almost as soon as it was created Obviously you can put as much crap on a CD as you like, as long as you remove it carefully afterwards, it'll still play fine(the surface is just flat acrylic so should wipe clean). But it certainly wont still play fine if you a)don't remove the chip grease at all, or b) remove it with sandpaper or the wrong type of cloth and soloution...

Incidentaly, radial scratches (from centre to edge) are the easiest for a CD players laser mechanism and error correction software to ignore, it's circular scratches that can't be compensated for and cause skipping. Almost the opposite to vinyl, in fact*. That's why the cleaning advise for CD's is to clean from centre to edge, not in a circular motion as the pattern of any small scratches you cause will effect the playbility outcome.


*With vinyl, a radial scratch will cause a click or skipping across the whole side, whereas one that follows the groove will only affect that one small part.

Minor CD scratches can apparentaly be 'fixed' with Brasso or similar polish that fills them in.

On the vinyl sound quality debate (which raged for about 10 years after CD's were introduced), my summary of the whole thing would be as follows;

Yes, CD's do sound better at the budget end, i.e. the very cheapest CD player costing a few pounds will sound better than those gawd-awful cheap things stuck on the top of 80's midi-hi-fi's, which will typically sound tinny, scratchy, and will skip when an ant farts in the next room.

BUT, throw some money at a record deck, even just a modest few hundred pounds, and the sound it will produce will be so much fuller, bassier (why DJ's still like vinyl) and more realistic than a cheap CD player, that you will be able to totally ignore the odd click and pop the record produces.

Go to silly extremes and spend thousands on a CD player and thousands on a record player, and the differences become much less certain.

In summary, the reason most people assume CD's sound better is because most people own pretty cheap hi-fi's and cheap record players don't sound good whereas cheap CD players can sound pretty OK

Blues - i realise that was exaggerating about the number of times i've played my LP's. I tend not to listen over and over again ad-nausium to even my favorite albums, so thinking about it, the very most i've probably played any LP would be about 20-25 times. Perhaps this is not enough to cause much audable reduction in sound quality. (and i consider my self something of an audiophile so I think i would pick up on any serious reduction of top-end or overall sound quality).

Traveller in Time with some damaged CDs
"The CD players have error correction routines, they can overcome a little loss of data.

Ahole in the CD of 1 mm^2 does not harm the sound, 1.5 mm^2 gives a little click and above 2.5 mm^2 the song will play erratic with one click per revolution.


Vinyl records can not cope with any (extra) hole drilled in them, you will loose the neadle at first hit. "

I bought my first CD at the same time as I bought my first CD player, in 1989. It was The Police, Zenyatta Mondata. It still plays perfectly. The old CDs are really heavy compared with the new ones. I don't know whether that's the disc itself or the box, but they weigh about twice as much as the modern ones.

If you hold an audio CD right up close to your eye (about 1 cm) and look at a light you will see lots of tiny holes in the aluminium. As TiT said, the error correction software in the player can cope with these. But CD-ROMs are not so forgiving, so errors like this may cause your CD-ROM to be unusable.

I've never had any major problems with CDs, the oldest ones I've got must have been purchased around 1987.

However, the number of CD players I've gone through in that time is phenomenal! They are getting better nowadays, but after a while they seem to loose the ability to read some CDs. The first ones I had used to do this after about 18 months to 2 years - nowadays they seem to last between 3 and 4 years, but I've _never_ had a CD that has become totally unplayable.

My first CD player packed it in after only about 14 years, so I'm onto my second one. But I fixed the first player after that.

If you or someone in your house is a smoker, it could be that the lens is getting mucky and just needs cleaned on your failing CD players, Whiskey.

Ever seen what happens to windows in a smokers house (if they don't clean them very often)? Well that thick film covers everything. Just a thought.

Some of the players I've had have been in smoky environments all their lives, some have been in completely smoke-free environments (depending on whether they were at home, at work, onboard a ship, in the car, etc.) I do clean lenses from time to time, but with front-loading CD players it's not that easy to do properly - The cleaning disks you can buy don't seem to do an awful lot of good.

I just seem to have this uncanny ability to kill a CD player very quickly.

The worst thing about CDs is they can be used as make-up mirrors. For this reason, most of mine are unplayable, but my oldest CDs are relatively new because for years (before I finally gave in and got a CD-player) I associated them with Dire Straits fans.

They're not at all loveable are they, though, CDs? At the risk of sounding as old as I am, there's no excitement to buying them. No gatefold. No coloured vinyl. No sleevenotes. No checking for messages in the run-out groove. No warping.

My oldest CD: One of those three-inch CD singles, 'Waterfall' by Wendy and Lisa! (1987) Do they still do those three-inch CDs and what was all that about? (The condition is OK but then it was too small except perhaps to put lipstick on with).

Traveller in Time collecting information
"I once got hold of a load (> 100) advertisement CD's painted the printed side silver and used them to create a x-mas tree.

Had to take it down as the whole neighborhood complained about the scatterring sunlight "

My daughter once dressed up for Halloween in a cardboard box covered in CDs. As far as she was concerned, she was a robot. She was probably about five at the time.

oh yes, the gatefold sleeves (still got my Pyramid poster from Dark Side of the Moon) that zip on Sticky Fingers...

and I'd completely forgotten about the run out message

And what about the LP, I'm sure I didn't dream this, where there were two grooves and depending on where the stylus landed was what you got to listen too (or did I dream that?)

No you didn't dream it. It wasn't exactly a standard feature though - it was usually found in limited edition singles and was a good way to squeeze double the number of tracks onto each side. You could see the parallel grooves if you looked closely

phew! I thought I was having a

oh and what about picture discs and so on. CDs really are boring.

Traveller in Time with a and a x-mas card
"They are both a CD, one with music the other with a company site .

The hamburger is really odd shaped, at audio CD speeds it is balanced enough I doubt it can do more the 2* CD speed. "

Aw wow, re vinyl with different 'random-playing' grooves - did anyone else have that horse-racing game that gave you a different commentated outcome every time? Ah it was simple fun in them days...

(Please don't shout at me for being off-topic! )