OFF: CD Rot

[Carl Edlund Anderson]

On 27/10/2004 10:11, Jon Jarrett wrote:
>         Weirdest thing I've seen in this line, or rather heard, was last
> time Sherman and I were working on Larry Boyd's Disarray stuff. The `first
> album' we have now put together was generating test discs (burnt through
> Nero using files created in Cool Edit) which were full of unlistenable
> crackly fizz. On one machine only. We burnt a second one and the effect
> had got worse, as if delay had been applied to it. But the blaster in the
> kitchen played them absolutely clean, while two computers' CD drives and
> soundcards picked up a tiny fragment of crackle but no more. We couldn't
> figure out what on earth had happened to the files that made it so
> disastrous for just this one player...

It could be that errors introduced by a somewhat wonky burner are
smoothed out by the hefty error correction that's built in (especially
these days) to consumer audio CD players but that computer CD drives
(not equipped with such error correction features) cough and spit a bit
more when they run into a bit of digital gristle.

In my admittedly non-pro experience, computer CD drives are much more
picky about what they will or won't read than standard audio CD players
(which you have to feed a pretty suspect slab of CD before they start to
run into trouble).

Cheers,
Carl

--
Carl Edlund Anderson
http://www.carlaz.com/