2014-05-14

Your CD's Are Dying

I have a lot of compact discs and albums. I mean, like, well over 1000. It's funny. Even when I was spending money on CDs back in the day I always had this nagging feeling of 'am I wasting my cash'? Will they be worthless in the long-term?

Of course, there's no real way to answer this since it's hard to derive and quantify the value of something you enjoy literally hundreds and hundreds of time. If you like a particular musician or band you probably have listened to their cd countless times over the years. All for $15. Not a bad deal when you look at it that way.

Anyway.

The Library of Congress is trying to figure out how CD's age.

"All of the modern formats weren't really made to last a long period of time," said Fenella France, chief of preservation research and testing at the Library of Congress. "They were really more developed for mass production."

France and her colleagues are trying to figure out how CDs age so that we can better understand how to save them. This is a tricky business, in large part because manufacturers have changed their processes over the years but won't say how. And so: we know a CD's basic composition—there's a plastic polycarbonate layer, a metal reflective layer with all the data in it, and then the coating on top—but it's impossible to tell just from looking at a disc how it will age."

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