How common are significant dropouts in compact disks?

[Timcognito]

Invest in some toothpaste and a polishing/buffing pad. You can buff out many scratches that might cause 'improper ripping' -- which in my experience ripping CDS since ripping because possible, is very, very rare, though I hardly buy CDS at thrift stores (I use Discogs for anything like that). I used to use EAC to rip but these days I use Accuraterip with secure ripping settings enabled, essentially the same thing.

I like the headlight restorer stuff and agree its rarely needed, maybe 6-7 on my 1200+ rips.

 

[levimax]

I always buy used CD's and have over 1,000 ripped. I used to use "secure" mode to rip the CD's which would try to "re-rip" sectors if an error was detected. In my experience not only did this waste a lot of time and wear and tear on the drive (sometimes it would spend over an hour trying to re-rip bad sectors) but seldom did this re-ripping complete successfully and even when it did it still often left "drop outs" or other audible issues. I now use "burst" mode which does not look for errors and instead quickly copies whatever data the drive puts out including the drive's error correction. In the vast majority of cases this results in a ripped file that plays without any audible issues even though it is not technically "bit perfect".

 

[krabapple]

I like the headlight restorer stuff and agree its rarely needed, maybe 6-7 on my 1200+ rips.

Any plastic polish will do. Toothpaste tends to be cheaper and readily at hand, though ;>

 

[Audioagnostic]

I used to have a "disc repair" device, designed to buff out scratches on CDs and other physical digital media. Usually helped with obvious scratches. I've got one disc that didn't get improved by the treatment—the DVD-A of Beck's "Guero". Turns out that the disc was overstuffed with visuals, resulting in numerous hang-ups. But you could choose from multiple visual "mixes". In any case, I'm finding very few CDs with scratches these days, even though I get a CD or two every week, thanks to so many classical discs being dumped on the market, selling for $1 a pop.

I buy a lot of CDs at thrift stores, classical CDs are mostly pristine, metal CDs not so much...

 

[RexrothPigeon]

Maybe it's a matter of climate and such, but most CDs I own are bought used, and the rest was 10-20 years old at time of ripping.
All verified with AccurateRip (foobar2000). Even some of the the problematic ones were rippable in "paranoid mode" or whatever it's now called.
Using two bog standard LG 5 1/4" drives. Or maybe I was just lucky.

I've had similar experiences, even with many, many discs from the 90s. I have had problems with old CDRs, but I guess that's to be expected.

 

[RexrothPigeon]

classical CDs are mostly pristine

Yeah, good point--nobody really listens to classical
(j/k)
(sorta)

 

[AnalogSteph]

People who listen to classical music also tend to take good care of their stuff and potentially have extensive collections. Besides, it's not the kind of material that lends itself to listening while out and about unless you have unusually well-isolating IEMs or the luxury of travelling in a very quiet vehicle. Plus, unless stuff's coming from an estate sale, CDs don't generally end up in thrift stores when they are being listened to on a regular basis, so I would expect a higher than average percentage of stuff that was previously gathering dust.

So far I've had much better luck with my classical thrifting finds than with the nonclassical kind. While I have found some gems, most of the latter ended up right back in the "gathering dust" category.

 

[RexrothPigeon]

People who listen to classical music also tend to take good care of their stuff and potentially have extensive collections.

Oh, I knew that's the implication you were goin for

 

[Robin L]

Yeah, good point--nobody really listens to classical
(j/k)
(sorta)

I'm one of them "nobodies".
Most recent find being one of those freebie BBC samplers of Sviatoslav Richter, featuring a scorching rendition of Schubert's D. 958 in C minor.

Hot stuff!

 

[Robin L]

People who listen to classical music also tend to take good care of their stuff and potentially have extensive collections.

Yep. But that doesn't mean that fans of other genres don't have extensive collections.

Besides, it's not the kind of material that lends itself to listening while out and about unless you have unusually well-isolating IEMs or the luxury of travelling in a very quiet vehicle.

I listen to classical music via the CD carousel in my Prius all the time. And yes, there are passages in orchestral recordings that get submerged by road and engine noise. But the mind generally fills in the blank spots thanks to memory.

Plus, unless stuff's coming from an estate sale, CDs don't generally end up in thrift stores when they are being listened to on a regular basis, so I would expect a higher than average percentage of stuff that was previously gathering dust.

Well, if you've got eight different renditions of Beethoven's 7th, there's gonna be a couple two-three that stay on the shelf. I've got a couple of copies of Bruckner's 7th that are about to be donated to the library. They are good, mind you, but the ones I'm keeping are better.

So far I've had much better luck with my classical thrifting finds than with the nonclassical kind. While I have found some gems, most of the latter ended up right back in the "gathering dust" category.

I've actually had a lot of luck with the rest of the genres. I volunteer at the local library. We get donations of books, CDs, DVDs and so on. No matter the genre, the discs are clean. Jewel cases? That's an entirely different matter.

 

[KomodoDragon]

If I were the original poster, I would expect about 5 discs that can’t be read 100% without errors on a decent computer drive. Hifi decks will always have more dropouts, but I personally would not pay for extra capability on dropouts.

If you want just listen to music without dropouts, I would not waste money on expensive player. My choice for a player would be your existing blu-ray, or cd-only pl150 most likely. If I need a specific disc to play better, I could buy another working copy, I could rip and burn a better copy, or listen losslessly from the net.

If you want to consider ripping discs to FLAC, my recommendation is to first go read some instructions how to rip audio cd using accuraterip. Get a full size external drive for ripping and try it yourself. If that is too much work for you, then forget it.

I would not place trust on previously mentioned ”burst” copies. Maybe 98% of my burst copies are good, but I have heard too many skips or blanked parts to rely on that. I’m currently using burst copy only for discs that are unreadable with any other methods.

In any case, if you start storing flacs, you also need to spend money on network attached storage for listening and a separate offline backup drive. Every mechanically spinning hard drive will fail over time. You need to figure in advance a plan for recovering in that exact situation. When the drive starts showing errors, it will be always too late to recover everything. The jury is still out on how many years data on ssd should be expected to survive. I am using silent ssd’s inside my NAS and large spinning drives offline.

 

[somebodyelse]

If I were the original poster, I would expect about 5 discs that can’t be read 100% without errors on a decent computer drive. Hifi decks will always have more dropouts, but I personally would not pay for extra capability on dropouts.

That's heavily dependent on the drive and the era. There was a time when they just made Red Book CDs and you just had to worry aboutthe quality of the transport. Then the manufacturers started worrying about ripping with CD drives, and they started making so-alled CDs that didn't meet the Red Book standards in various ways in an attempt to stop ripping. Back then a few review sites started testing with standard error test discs plus the various known non-standard ones to see which drives could still rip bit-perfect and which couldn't - which often depended on which firmware revision you had, because those taking note of the reviews would release a better version to get some sales. Eventually the cost of returns became too high, mostly because in-car CD players were using CDROM drives so the CDs wouldn't play properly in cars, and the manufacturers reverted to releasing standards-compliant discs. I paid extra for a drive that could rip anything I threw at it, rather than buying and hoping.

If I need a specific disc to play better, I could buy another working copy, I could rip and burn a better copy, or listen losslessly from the net.

Assumes the version you want (mix without excessive compression for example) is available to stream. Often you don't get the choice of which mix/master you want.

In any case, if you start storing flacs, you also need to spend money on network attached storage for listening and a separate offline backup drive. Every mechanically spinning hard drive will fail over time. You need to figure in advance a plan for recovering in that exact situation. When the drive starts showing errors, it will be always too late to recover everything. The jury is still out on how many years data on ssd should be expected to survive. I am using silent ssd’s inside my NAS and large spinning drives offline.

All drives fail eventually. My experience is that SSDs tend to fail more catastrophically than spinning rust. I've managed to recover everything from the HDDs (by sticking them in the fridge then using ddrescue while they're still cold for a subsection of the disc, etc.) while the SSD stops responding entirely. Not that my experience is statistically reliable, but it's held through CF (IDE in a smaller connector), SATA, and NVMe. If you care about your data you need good backups irrespective of the storage media you're using.

 

[levimax]

I would not place trust on previously mentioned ”burst” copies. Maybe 98% of my burst copies are good, but I have heard too many skips or blanked parts to rely on that. I’m currently using burst copy only for discs that are unreadable with any other methods.

My experience is that about 98% of discs rip fine so we agree. Of the 2% that don't rip clean my experience is most can not be "recovered" even with hours of "re-ripping" and of the minority that do complete being "recovered" most of those still have drop outs. In burst mode most everything rips and of the 2% of files that don't rip clean most end up not having dropouts because they use the error correction built into the drive. For me "burst mode" is massively faster and results in fewer total dropouts although not every file will be "bit perfect". YMMV.