Re: CD's and Sharpies

[das <das@ubuibi.org>]

not quite an urban myth about some first generation cd's going sour.
some early manifacturers were pretty negligent about moisture
i watched my nww discs turn brown over a 3 year period


Travis Hartnett wrote:

> >You don't really need to worry about using Sharpies >on commercial CDs 
>(ones
> >pressed), the problem as described is with CD-R >media.
>
> I've heard the "Sharpies eat through CD-R" story and I'm a bit skeptical 
>since
> I never hear about what the "safe" pen is and I also remember the urban 
>myth
> that regular CDs would start to rot after three or four years 
>("Dude...it's
> already happening at radio stations..." usually accompanied this 
>information).
>  I've got over a thousand commercially produced CDs, dating back fifteen
> years, and I've yet to find one that was "rotting".
>
> And the idea that analog reel-to-reel is a stable format isn't watertight
> either.  If you store the reels vertically, tail out, in a
> humidity/temperature controlled environment, with a minute of blank tape
> between each take to avoid print-through and have the studio assistant 
>rotate
> the reels in their box a quarter turn each month to prevent the weight 
>of the
> tape from flattening under gravity's influence AND you're lucky enough to
> avoid the periodic bad batches of tape that get produced, then you'll 
>probably
> be able to play the tape back in a few decades.
>
> Dig back through old issues of Mix or EQ and you can find plenty of 
>horror
> stories of 2" masters that need to be baked in a warm oven for a few 
>hours
> before they'll play long enough [once. maybe] to be transferred to 
>another
> format (usually digital in the accounts I've read [Roger Nichols/Steely 
>Dan
> pops to mind]).  And these were tapes stored under allegedly professional
> conditions.  For the home user, the idea of maintaining a tape vault is
> prohibitively expensive and quite unlikely.  I've got CD-Rs that are five
> years old that have been stored under normal household circumstances, 
>and I've
> yet to have one go bad.  Make new copies of all your CD-R masters each 
>year if
> you're paranoid, or give up the idea that every note needs to be 
>preserved for
> all time.
>
> TH