I'm not sure of the media "deteriorating" per se, but I will give a short description of popular methods of CD-R and CD-RW techniques. Basically, we're dealing with teh same sort of principle as vinyl, accept the laser in a CD player or CD rom is reflected off of the reflective material in the CD that is different heights and widths (although it's read a bit differently than on vinyl [from what i hear - this is the part i'm not so familiar with]). The "burning" process actually involves the CD "burner" hitting a recordable CD that has a reflective material with dye on it. This dye is manipulated by the laser so that can make the pits and grooves (although extremely small) so that it can be read by another. I would assume that if this dye is cheap enough (or in some cases the actual metal film is in itself manipulated by the laser) it could be concluded that over use the "normal" type laser could affect the pits and grooves and therefore affect the sound. I've not heard of this, tho, so I won't try to substantiate or disprove.
cheers, dense On Mon, 5 Jul 2004, Toby Frith wrote: > > Interesting point about file retention. I read somewhere that a lot of cheaper CD-Rs only last for about 2 - 3 years before the quality slowly disintegrates. Not sure how, but I'm sure some tech people could source that. I mean, how much would you pay for a hard drive of say, 100 gigs worth of music that in essence could be duplicated in a very short time?
