[vorbis] When CDs Go Bad

[J C Fitzgerald]

Hi All,

Some of the discussion recently has touched on ripping one's own CDs
for archival purposes.  I've consistantly rejected the idea of doing
this in my case for space and time reasons, and in the belief that
commercially produced CDs when properly treated can be expected to have
a very long life.  However, I'm now questioning this assumption.

I have a 2 CD set of "The Phantom of the Opera" on the Polydor label
which I purchased new in the late 1980s.  Both discs have always been
stored together in the same case and played the same number of times on
the same player; in short, they have the same history since pruchase.
Both appear visually to be in the same excellent condition.

But on my latest playing of them, the second CD has acquired some fairly
substantial white noise which varies in sympathy with the music volume.
The music itself is intact and the player seems to have no problem
reading the disc.  I have not tried playing it on another system as
yet, but given that this is the only CD which exhibits this problem,
I strongly suspect it is not a player fault.

So I have two questions to which someone out there may know the answers:

1.  What has caused this problem, and

2.  Can I expect other CDs in my collection to suffer the same fate at
    around the same age?

This post is a little OT, but I'm hoping your responses will help me
decide (again) whether or not to archive my CD collection (with FLAC,
but the FLAC list is ultra-quiet).

TIA,
John.
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