CD rot returns... but with a twist
I had a frightening Christmas break. Since I live in Sydney, at least
half my time off was spent listening to the rain beating down
on the roof... and, in my case, coming in through the roof and
windows, and also fl ooding the back of my house. But that wasn’t
the frightening bit.
The frightening bit was when I started ripping my CDs to a new
NAS. I decided this would be a great project for a rainy week. I could
insert CDs and read books during the rips, thereby multi-tasking
and not feeling even a bit guilty about not being out in the great
outdoors. My fi rst fright came when I opened the cases of some of
my older double and triple-CD sets, many of which came with thin
squares of foam inserted behind the CDs to keep them in place. The
very fi rst one I opened was Andreas Vollenweider’s ‘The Trilogy’ and
when I tried to remove the foam insert I found it had stuck to the
label side of the disc. Bad.
But when I looked more closely, I discovered that where it had
stuck to the disc, it was because the foam had disintegrated and in
so doing had dissolved both the label and much of the aluminium
refl ective layer beneath it. As you’ve no doubt guessed, it was
unplayable. Worse.
I then pulled out all my other multi-disc albums only to fi nd
that almost every single one where I’d left the foam inside had been
completely destroyed by the so-called ‘protective’ foam insert. In
the few cases where I had removed the foam from the case, the CDs
inside were fi ne. Since I have a great many multi-disc sets, this was a
disaster. But there was more to come.
When I went onto the internet to re-purchase the discs that had
been destroyed, I discovered that some were not available at all, and
of those that were, most were now available only as ‘re-masters’...
and I’ll give you one guess what ‘re-mastered’ means these days.
Yep, they’ve been re-equalised to suit the mastering engineer’s
personal taste and at the same time compressed to within an inch of
their lives, removing the original dynamics. Then it got even worse.
As I worked my way through my single-disc CD cases, I came
across case after case that didn’t contain a CD. And, as the pile
of empty CD cases grew taller, I began to wonder where they’d
all gone. Since I don’t own a car they weren’t in a travel case
somewhere. Then the penny dropped. I’d left them in CD players
that had been returned to distributors after I’d fi nished reviewing
them. Easy to do, but dumb.
When I went on the replacement trail, I ran into problems
again. One that particularly galled me was that one of my favourite
CDs, Janis Ian’s album ‘Between The Lines’ is now available only
in the DMG label on which the sound isn’t nearly as good as on
the version I owned, which was from Ian’s own ‘Rude Girl Records’
and another one of hers, that was pressed to synchonise with her
Australian tour and has tracks that aren’t available on any of her
other album, is completely out of print. I ended up having to go
on E-Bay to buy a second-hand copy... which I ended up paying
through the nose for.
Why am I telling you all this? So you can go through your
own CD collection right now—particularly if you ripped your discs
some time ago and they’ve been in storage—and remove any CD-
destroying foam inserts before it’s too late! greg borrowmanProudly distributed in Australia bySYNERGY
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