Do CD-R's Damage my CD Player?

No, it's a myth that was created quite recently by smug vinyl elitist hipsters looking for yet another excuse to trash Compact Discs ever more!

 

Reminds me of taking my $20 portable Singer TT to high school every day from 1968-71 to share listening to records with friends before school and during the lunch hour; it was a VERY formative experience for me, as ALL of us got to hear records that no one of us could have afforded.

 

You can see this at airports, who always have CNN on their giant TVs. When the picture goes dark, you can still see the CNN logo faintly visible. Of course, this only happens on panels where this is a problem, which at this point are mostly old plasma displays. This doesn't happen with LCDs (the old fluorescent tube type nor the LED backlit type) but it does happen with OLEDs. As pointed out above, this first became a phenomenon with old tube TVs, which is why there are screen savers, even on modern computers. You would get the Windows toolbar, or the MacOS menu bar, burned into the top or bottom of the screen on old CRT computer monitors.

Back to our original programming: CDRs won't damage a regular CD player. You might have an old CD player that can't play CDRs because the laser pickup is somewhat out of spec, and you'll hear it try to read the CDR a few times and fail, but that won't damage the CD player, either.

 

As to airports, I think the last time I was in one was c. 1991, when taking Randy Weston to the local one for his return flight home; I had a bid an early adieu as I still couldn't pass through the metal detector when my pants were the only thing I still had on; at that point, I gave up.

I've never had any real issues with CD-Rs playing, as once they were finalized, they played fine on what I had recorded them on; if I make dupes, it's generally with a computer.

The TASCAM I currently have in the stereo system, OTOH, displays DISC ERROR! several times a week when I put in commercially produced discs that play just fine in any other of the several players I have.

 

The laser in a CD player is set for a constant output. At least it was in the products we sold with CD players in the past. I know this because we were required to report the laser output of the CD player to the FDA Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) on an annual basis.

I never heard of a CDR damaging a CD player and I have used nothing but burned CDr's in my Jeeps exclusively ever since CDr's became available to the public so I did not have to expose my original silver discs to potential damage. I would always burn a copy for mobile listening and never had an issue.

Way off topic, Regarding burn in with OLED's, is there a recommended preconditioning process when you buy one new?

When I finally convinced my wife it was time to upgrade from our 31" Toshiba CRT TV to a big flat screen I researched the differences between LED and Plasma which were the only choices at the time. I decided on Plasma due to the lack of motion lag, no backlight bleeding and the ability to get near black colors and better contrast in dark scenes.

I was concerned with burn in for my Panasonic Plasma TV when I purchased it but found there was a preconditioning process where there was a built in app that would rotate full screen colors that changed every few seconds that would help minimize burn in risks. If memory serves me the theory was the preconditioning would help to take the edge off the color phosphors so there was less likelihood of burn in. I forget how many hours they recommended the user run this app before they started using the Plasma to watch content but it seemed like it took forever as I was anxious to use my new Plasma.

I ran the preconditioning app and have never had an issue with burn in on the Panasonic since I have owned it.

The only time you can see even a faint trace of burn, or possibly just temporary ghost images, is if you run a pure white screen and even then it is very faint and you never see it when watching any regular content. I have never had an issue with station logo burn in.

I love my Panasonic Plasma and was disappointed when they discontinued them. Not sure what I will do when it is time for a new TV but want one that has minimal motion lag, deep blacks and no backlight bleeding so it may have to be an OLED or whatever technology is current at that time.

 

There was an issue with using "data" CDRs in an HHB CD burner, I think it was model 825, made for the consumer market when most of their burners were made for the pro market and used "data" discs, many of you will remember the "music" discs that were the only blank CDRs that could be used in consumer models. Usually, consumer models would simply refuse to boot up a "data" CDR. It turned out that you could use data CDRs in the model 825, but they would cause an internal damage that would render the unit unusable within 100 "burns", and there wasn't a very clear warning about using data discs when the model 825 was introduced.

 

All I will say is that CD-Rs seem to go wrong on my car CD multi-changer - skipping, refusing to play etc - whereas commercial CDs never do. Even though I do not buy the cheapest CD-Rs and try to read the reviews first. I believe the concern about CD-Rs and high quality CD players is whether they made the tracking mech work harder and thus ultimately shorten the longevity of the device. I have no idea if that is a fake or a legitimate concern as I don't know much about CD players. I still play CD-Rs in my car as it doesn't have an input for a phone or bluetooth. And some of them still stop playing and develop tracks that skip or get stuck. Not sure why.

 

I have read that hackers have embedded malware code into supposedly blank CD-Rs. That code gets read by the CD burner and infects its firmware. Then, when the conditions are right, the malware causes the CD-R to spin up to nearly 100,000 rpm causing a massive failure of the device (and potential death to the user.)

 

you forgot the bit where the CD laser cuts the CD disc into the shape of a shuriken before the mechanism ejects it with a force equal to a skilled Ninja

 

Another issue is when the labels aren’t applied dead-center/evenly so when the disc is spinning in the player it’s unbalanced weight-wise. When it gets to a certain point the laser can’t read the disc although the disc is still spinning (usually very wildly, it’s quite noticeable - you hear it clunking around).