What Is Your Oldest CD? How Does It Sound?

[Cato]

Supposedly CD's lose quality as the years go by, perhaps in as few as 10 years.

My oldest CD is a LONDON recording of Schoenberg's Verklaerte Nacht and Wagner's Siegfried Idyll.

I won it through a "Name That Tune" contest on the local classical station in 1984!

It still sounds fine, but perhaps is not quite as "spacious" as before.  (Or perhaps my memory of its sound is wrong.)  Certainly there are no blank spots or blips!

[Dr. Dread]

No problems. Just with burned CDs, and those infrequently.

[Franco]

My first CD purchase, which despite Amazon's claim, was in the mid-1980s, not 1992:



It still sounds beautiful.

[KevinP]

The Police's second album. Not really a big fan of theirs, but I had to buy some disc the day I bought my player, and choices were pretty skimpy then. Record stores usually showcased their entire CD collection on a single display rack, often behind locked glass. My second was a Hoffman-mastered Coltrane disc.

I have older CDs but I bought them years later.

And yes, it's only burned CDs that degrade over time, not baked ones, barring the few manufacturers who opened themselves to CD rot.

[Scarpia]

Supposedly CD's lose quality as the years go by, perhaps in as few as 10 years.

Audio CDs contain numerical data written in a highly redundant fashion (i.e., each track contains duplicate data so that if the player fails to read the data from the primary location in can fill in identical data written in an alternate location on the disc).   It is therefore close to a mathematical impossibility that the recording sounds less "spacious" as the disc ages.  Data loss must surpass a very high threshold before lossless error correction fails, and this will typically result in a click or a pop.  The error correction code was designed to defeat surface scratches, and there must be more than 1 mm of unrecovered data before the lossless error correction code finds itself unable to repair and must resort to lossy correction.

Saying the CD sounds less spacious as it ages is like saying that you bought a copy of Moby Dick in 1982, and since the book got older Ahab is less obsessive.

I think my oldest CD is the Karajan Shostakovich 10, and I would say it maintains the rather strident sound it had when new, although my current player is superior to the one I had in the 80's.

[Papageno]

Still sounds excellent.

[Gurn Blanston]

I didn't have any that were old until about 5 years ago when I bought a small collection from a widow who didn't share her late husband's interests. He was possibly unusual (at least in MY book) in that I found inside each CD booklet the original sales receipt from the local record store. So the oldest of them dates from 1982 and the newest from 1994 or so. They play and sound like brand new disks.

[bhodges]

The first CD I bought was this Rachmaninov Isle of the Dead and Symphonic Dances, with Ashkenazy and the Concertgebouw.  It still sounds great.  I recently found a used copy of the original (it's been re-released) in very good condition, and it sounds just fine, also.  

I do try and keep discs clean, e.g., if I notice fingerprints (i.e., skin oils) or other things that could conceivably alter the outer layer.  But CDs seem remarkably resistant.

--Bruce

[ChamberNut]

All my CDs sound as clear and crisp as the day I bought them.

My first CD purchase ever was in Spring 1990 (White Lion - Pride). 

[71 dB]

Supposedly CD's lose quality as the years go by, perhaps in as few as 10 years.

Not really, unless they are manufactured poorly. The very idea of digital media is that they retain full quality for a certain time after which the amount of bit errors starts to build up and the media becomes useless. CDs are estimated to last about 100 years, at least decades as the first CDs manufactured are still working very well.

I don't know what is my oldest CD. Many CDs don't tell when they were released, only when the original release (vinyl) was released. I have a few released in 1985. Something older? I don't know. I started collecting in 1990.

[Cato]

Audio CDs contain numerical data written in a highly redundant fashion (i.e., each track contains duplicate data so that if the player fails to read the data from the primary location in can fill in identical data written in an alternate location on the disc).   It is therefore close to a mathematical impossibility that the recording sounds less "spacious" as the disc ages.  Data loss must surpass a very high threshold before lossless error correction fails, and this will typically result in a click or a pop.  The error correction code was designed to defeat surface scratches, and there must be more than 1 mm of unrecovered data before the lossless error correction code finds itself unable to repair and must resort to lossy correction.

Saying the CD sounds less spacious as it ages is like saying that you bought a copy of Moby Dick in 1982, and since the book got older Ahab is less obsessive.

I think my oldest CD is the Karajan Shostakovich 10, and I would say it maintains the rather strident sound it had when new, although my current player is superior to the one I had in the 80's.

Okay!  Scarpia, many thanks!  You have put my mind at ease!  Great example with Moby Dick!   

As far as my impression of the Schoenberg CD changing its tune, I suspect it is also possible that my stereo system - now in a small townhouse, rather than our regular house (long and extremely sad story) - now has a different sound.

[Todd]

My first CD was Pink Floyd's Animals.  It sounds better now than the day I bought it, but that's because my stereo is much better than when I bought the disc.

[Scarpia]

Okay!  Scarpia, many thanks!  You have put my mind at ease!  Great example with Moby Dick!   

As far as my impression of the Schoenberg CD changing its tune, I suspect it is also possible that my stereo system - now in a small townhouse, rather than our regular house (long and extremely sad story) - now has a different sound.

BUT, try this scary exercise.  Find you oldest CD and hold it up in front of a bright light.  You will probably see numerous tiny pinholes.  Now try it with a new CD, don't see any.  I suspect that the aluminum layer inside the CD deteriorates with time due to tiny impurities embedded in the plastic.  The discs all seem to read just fine anyway due to error correction, but it seem possible that some day the deterioration will become too much and pops or dropouts will occur.

[Wendell_E]

On April 15, 1984, I bought my first CD player and three CDs:  Glenn Gould's second recording of the Goldberg Variations, Jessye Norman and Kurt Masur's recording of Strauss's Vier letzte Lieder and other Strauss songs, and Ashkenazy's recording of the Sibelius' 4th Symphony and Luonnotar.  Last time I checked, they all played perfectly.

[Franco]

I bought my first CD BEFORE I had a CD player.  My recording of the Durufle Requiem sat around for several months before I brought home the new thingie.  I remember thinking that the sound was amazing, but also feeling perturbed that all my LPs that would soon be overshadowed by the new technology.  And I was pissed at the idea of actually replacing them - I couldn't bring myself to do that, but I did buy the same works by different bands, plenty of times. 

Funny thing is, at this precise time of life I am converting all those LPs into CDs.  Only in a few cases did I replace the LP recording with a CD, cheap guy that I am - it only took me 25 years to get around to going digital with the vinyl.

[drogulus]

    I don't know the date of manufacture of my oldest CDs. I started buying CDs in 1990, but some were made years earlier. I haven't had one failure. It looks like CD degeneration is a false alarm. And no, digital music doesn't age. If you ran Windows 95 on your PC it might look old-fashioned, but it wouldn't look faded. 

   

     

[Scarpia]

The thought that I have both this


and this


is a little depressing, recordings I bought at first release are now "originals."   

[snyprrr]

I have a 1980 DG cd (Maderna???). I want a prize!

Please, someone tell me, when were cds invented? I do have a sick cd fetish... always wanting original releases, etc... haha, yea, I'm glad I never got into this with LPs!

Ahhh, I remember the long box!

[Scarpia]

Please, someone tell me, when were cds invented?

You've never heard of google or wikipedia?

I do have a sick cd fetish... always wanting original releases, etc... haha

Apparently you are a stickler for inferior sound.

[Cato]

On the invention of the first CD: Wikipedia says there various types invented in the 1970's.

But then for a CD resembling the ones today:

The first test CD was pressed in Hannover, Germany by the Polydor Pressing Operations plant in 1981. The disc contained a recording of Richard Strauss's Eine Alpensinfonie, played by the Berlin Philharmonic and conducted by Herbert von Karajan.[9] In August 1982 the real pressing was ready to begin in the new factory, not far from the place where Emil Berliner had produced his first gramophone record 93 years earlier. By now, Deutsche Grammophon, Berliner's company and the publisher of the Strauss recording, had become a part of PolyGram. The first CD to be manufactured at the new factory was The Visitors by ABBA. [10] The first album to be released on CD was Billy Joel's 52nd Street, that reached the market alongside Sony's CD player CDP-101 on October 1, 1982 in Japan.[

(My emphasis above)

As to why the CD has its present size:

The partners aimed at a playing time of 60 minutes with a disc diameter of 100 mm (Sony) or 115 mm (Philips).[6] Von Karajan suggested extending the capacity to 74 minutes to accommodate Wilhelm Furtwängler's recording of Beethoven's 9th Symphony from the 1951 Bayreuth Festival.[19] [20]
The extra 14-minute playing time subsequently required changing to a 120 mm disc. Kees Immink, Philips' chief engineer, however, denies this, claiming that the increase was motivated by technical considerations, and that even after the increase in size, the Furtwängler recording would not have fit on one of the earliest CDs.[5][6] According to a Sunday Tribune interview,[21] the story is slightly more involved. In 1979, Philips owned Polygram, one of the world's largest distributors of music. Polygram had set up a large experimental CD plant in Hanover, Germany, which could produce huge numbers of CDs having, of course, a diameter of 115 mm. Sony did not yet have such a facility. If Sony had agreed on the 115-mm disc, Philips would have had a significant competitive edge in the market. Sony decided that something had to be done. The long playing time of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony imposed by Ohga was used to push Philips to accept 120 mm, so that Philips' Polygram lost its edge on disc fabrication.[21]