Are 10-20 year old CDRs still playing?

Been using music CDRs and a stand alone burner for well over a decade and absolutely none of them have quit playing perfectly yet.
Occasionally I get a faulty disc which screws up immediately upon initial playback after burning but that's it.
Also have a fair number of CDRs burned off by friends and acquaintances for me during the last decade and a half and they all play fine , too.

 

Analog VHS tape degrades. Physically as long as the cassette is not damaged of course it will play, but detail and color fading + other malady's have been occurring on them since the first day they were made or recorded. I transferred my family's home "movie" VHS to digital format as soon as I had the capability to do so. The difference between the files and DVD's I made 12-14 years ago compared to the original VHS is striking in terms of the amount of color and detail lost since then.

30 year old blu-ray and DVD's, eh?

 

HP CDRs twelve years old are still working fine, they are OOP but I still have a 50 pack.

 

Most of my hundreds of CD-Rs still play fine. Memorex and Maxell discs seemed to degrade most often. And all the discs that used adhesive labels (which I never used myself) eventually stopped working.

 

I wonder what the failure rate of the gold cd-r's are when compared to silver discs.

 

Are 10-20 year old CDRs still playing?

No problems to date. Mostly Maxell music CDRs used.

 

more no than yes in my experience; depends what they were burned on and what's playing them of course, but for instance in my car they don't play at all

 

I just finished ripping about 1100 CD-R's that I've burnt between November 2003 and November 2006 (using a Samsung burner, EAC, Plextor CD-R's@4x) and they all ripped perfectly fine. (I even verified them with the AR database.) Protect your CD-R's from sunlight and from humidity and they should last very long.

 

I have not had trouble with Cdrs. I was collecting a lot of "field recordings" 10-15 years ago, and all are fine. I did make a point of copying anything on a low quality cdr to a Mitsui cdr..Mitsui's being rated for quality and longevity. I have had factory pressed aluminum cd's degrade. In 2010 I noticed the cd's in my Aretha Franklin Queen of Soul box set (which I purchased sometime around 1992) had deteriorated and would not play. I wrote to Rhino and they provided a replacement.

 

I have had no problem with stuff burned on quality CD-R's at lower speeds (no more than 4x), they still play perfectly.

The only trouble I've ever had with my own CD-R's are ones that wouldn't play well within a few weeks, probably because the discs were defective or in one case burned at maximum speed (which I did only because I needed to burn a long recording to transfer from one computer to another).

If you get promo CD-R's from a record company, don't expect them to hold up. They cranked those suckers out on the cheapest discs they could find, and at the highest speeds possible. They weren't meant for archival purposes, they were just promos that had to do the job until the actual album became widely known and/or available. If anything, the record company didn't want them to last.

 

My Quantegy, HHB, MFSL and MAM-A gold CD-R's all still play perfectly. I played one from 1998 last night...

Bob

 

No problems here, at least not yet anyway. And I've used a variety of CDRs over the years.


I've really only had problems with discs that are defective right out of the package, and much more so recently than in the past. I bought some Memorex CDRs that were garbage in this regard, but I haven't had any problems with Sony.

 

I've been making CD-R's since the year 2000. The blanks I've used are from many manufactures, some brand name and some not. I have only had one problem disc. It was a Imation. The back foil-like surface was starting to peal. The disc was still playable however, so I re-copied it and everything worked out fine. As a side note I never burn faster than 4X.

 

I've had cheap no-name CDRs fail on me only months after being burned. And I have some 19 year old MAM-As which still work like the day they were burned. So the quality of the CDR seems pretty relevant in this discussion.

 

http://www.digitalfaq.com/reviews/dvd-media.htm
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/media/

While mostly geared for DVD-R, the site for me has been an indispensable blank media reference guide and forum since 2006

 

I get a very occasional failure, but generally, CDRs I burned 5-15 years ago play perfectly. At some point I got fussy and switched to Taiyo-Yudens, but plenty of my old discs are on no-name media too.

 

Oldest ones must be Waitec CDRs (are these guys still around?) from 1999 and they play fine. It should be noted that those early thick CDRs were usually burned at 2x speed using quality machines so that may account for their quality. By the way: HP, Philips, Sony, Verbatim, Maxell, Emtec, TDK they all worked. The worst I used were branded "Princo".

 

Your so right, screws them up completly. Stopped doing that 10 or so years ago

 

Just be sure to go around the edge of the hard drives with a green marker and you'll be fine.

 

I have CD-R's way over 10 years old and they still play great. I've also had DVD-R's and DL DVD+R's which I made in 2006-on with no problems. You just have to get past the initial burn. I stopped using the stick-on labels years ago. They eventually come off and I've had them through the balance off, especially when brand new.

 

I have discs that have been sitting in a car for the past decade that still play fine. They're more durable than I ever assumed they'd be, and more durable than they probably need to be, since now my entire library has been ripped and also lives out in the cloud, where I can access every track from anyplace I have a cell or wifi signal...

 

Ha! Dug out my old cd wallet from decades ago for my car, randomly picked one, this is date stamped/created 94, plays great!
Maxell Japan, must of been my blank disc of choice -I have a bunch, I may have some older, I'll have to check

 

Kool! I always preferred and still do Maxell recording tape.

 

I recently went through several dozen - both audio and computer data - from 10-15 years old. Most were cheap, but a few were brand-name CD-Rs. About 5 percent were bad; EAC revived a couple of the audio CD-Rs. Old CD-R media will gradually degrade when it is exposed to light. I also gave up on CD-RW media years ago; it is less reliable.

 

Just a note for those who aren't aware: MAM-A was formerly Mitsui. So MAM-A is also reliable.