AudioBanter.com - View Single Post - ### Why do this happen to my audio cd's ??? ###

In article ,
(albert) wrote:

(Dick Pierce) wrote in message
. com...
(albert) wrote in message
om...
Will audio CD get scratches if they are played often ? Can using the
fast forward (ex moving from song # 1 to song# 7 )options on your
audio player cause scratches on the the CD ?

I always check the audio CD's I buy and Im lucky enought that 99% of
the ones Ive bought have no scratches when new. Of these 99%
scratchless CD when new
, I noticed that some of them ( specially those I listen to quite
often ) have some scratches.

What kind of scratches?

Are they nice and circular, concentric with the center of the disk,
either all the way around or partial arcs? If so, they would indicate
that there is something touching the disk while it's spinning.

Are they perfectly straight scratches, maybe even parallel to one
another? If so, that might indicate a problem occuring when the CD
drawer is opening or closing.

Are they random direction, length, very different from CD to CD? If
so, these are problem scratches resulting from improper handling.

Thanks for the responce guys I appreciate it. As far as cleaning I
only use a CD lens cleaner. Its like a CD that has some soft brushes
that you play for about 15 sec. The scratches are random in direction
, length and different from CD to CD. If this is the result of
improper handling then I dont know what Im doing wrong. I dont touch
the silver side of the CD, I dont bend the cd. When placing the CD on
the player I make sure its placed level. The CD player is in a fixed
location and my cd player is a Sony which I bought brand new. After
listening I take ample care in removing the cd and place it back in
its individual plastic case . This is why Im really surprised on why
these scratches occur specially now that you guys have made it known
to me that The CD player uses light to read the data on the disk so
there is no physical
contact other than the center spindle area. I think I would take my
player to a Sony service center to see if its the CD player which is
the cause of this.

Is the audio quality of Mp3 as good or better than those on CD ? Im
considering making MP3 copies of all my CD .

You don't have to use MP3. You can save them uncompressed (lossless) if
you have the hard drive space for it. Uncompressed CD data is about
10.1MB a minute.

MP3 encoders vary greatly in quality in that there are many ways to
calculate how to encode music using limited bandwidth. LAME is supposed
to be one of the better ones. The AAC/MPEG 4 format can be very good
but it's not as widely supported yet.