Kevin Bresnahan

It's time to lock this before it gets too political.

Which is why Jim A. is pretty much OK with it being closed. You know that he hates doing that here.

Finerpoppin' Records is a new bootleg label to me. There is no info anywhere on the web about it. It says "Made in the EU", but the EU PD cutoff is 1962, so this isn't in the public domain there. I wonder if it's another Blue Moon/Jordi Pujol label? He usually presses sessions like these in Andorra where the EU PD cutoff is not observed.

If we can keep pictures and references to you-know-who out of it, we can try to leave this open. If it gets too political, Jim A has directed me to close it.

When my daughters were little, they loved Disney movies, with my oldest loving "The Little Mermaid" to the point that I wore out two VHS tape copies of it. I decided to get a laser disc player to stop having to re-buy VHS tapes. One day I came home from work and found out that my girls had decided to play hopscotch in the living room and thought that the laser discs were the perfect size for their feet. Two laser discs cracked in half. CD-Rs are very different from manufactured CDs and some players won't play a perfectly good CD-R. Instead of pits and lands there are dye & holes-in-dye. As I understand it, the frequency of the laser works in a way that for a manufactured CD, the reflected signal is out of phase and gets "scattered" depending on if it lands on a pit (top area) or a land (depressed area). CD-Rs work the same way. but the dye is what scatters the light. The reflective layer has solid pit "ridges" with dye coated over it. The dye should block a refection from the reflective layer underneath. Depending on the dye, some amount of light gets reflected back. If the dye degrades enough. too much light gets reflected and those pits become lands. In a way, it looks like CD-Rs work the opposite of manufactured CDs in that the land is technically the top of a pit. I just learned this today (I assume it's right). I was always told that heat and direct sunlight were bad for CD-Rs, as they degraded the dye quicker. Some dyes were better than others but no CD-R dye will last long if left in direct sunlight.

I have had many CDs & CD-Rs fail and ticks are the usual audible result. Static is the next one and it usually only happens with a very damaged disc. Dead discs won't play. That has only happened with a few discs in my experience and those CDs looked like somebody tap danced on them. But again - the audio equivalent of this is not simply a messed up sound stage. No way. An audio equivalent of this would be static or pops. Photo files are typically decoded by lines. That last picture clearly had lines of damaged data. This much damage can be shown as colored blocks in a photo but that is likely the photo display programs method of interpolation. Audio can't "patch up" that much blank space and will mute the audio or even stop playing.

Not at all. i just googled "distortions caused by corrupted photo files" and got stuff like this... with the closest picture that looked like a distorted image looking so bad that an audio equivalent to this would not be listenable... Most of the examples are just missing parts of the picture. In an audio file, this would be very audible.

But you agree that a cloudy area as most can cause static, muting or skips? It will not results in any audio shifts in frequency or levels, just noisy stuff like you describe.

It's technically impossible to get the type of modified analog output that is being described here. It's simply not possible to have frequency shifts and level shifts because of a couple of misread bits. NOT POSSIBLE. Exactly!! Static. Muting. Skips. All can be the result of a dirty or scratched disc! Not "improved soundstage" or any type of frequency or level shift. Here, we agree.

There are 4 levels of error correction at play and even if they all fail, the first nasty correction is interpolation and the next step is muting. Neither of these levels will happen for a "dirty" disc, It would take a major scratch to cause these to kick in. The second level correction (muting) is sometimes audible (likely showing up as skips or pops) but not frequency or level shifts. If the errors are so severe that muting can't be done, the disc skips. This is not true. If the file is so corrupted that it can't be converted to an image, you'll get a partial image, not a changed image. Did you never have a corrupted download of a photo? It's usually looks perfect and then simply chops off where the data is corrupted. In the early days of the Internet, this happened often.

No - it will sound as it was digitized. Not different at all. If you digitize a photo of a statue of liberty and the file gets corrupted, you don't get a picture of the Eiffel Tower. In order for the analog output to have a different "soundstage", millions of bits would have to change. I'm not exaggerating here. A few seconds of music is 100's of thousands of bits. To change the frequencies and output levels, we're not talking a few bits flipped here & there... we're talking an entirely different sequence of data. It would be a totally different sequence to change the analog output that much.

Tor Lundvall’s “Yule” might not fit most people’s definition of Christmas music, but it sure is a cool looking LP. And the inner liner has some of his yuletide drawings...

The data is the data. Improving the reading of the data doesn't change the data itself, it just makes it easier to read. Let's say that the data on a CD is not music. Let's say it's a .doc file. If this disc has a thumb print on it that causes readback errors that error correction can fix, you are not going to open a different document. You're gong to get the document - the only document. It will say whatever was written in it when it was saved to that file. It will not change that document to say something completely different. CD music playback is simply a way to open a file. Unlike a file like a .doc file, these files are opened sequentially. That is the only difference between CD playback and opening a file. A document file gets opened and buffered until the whole file is read. CD "files" (music files) open as they're read. Let me ask you to try this instead. Take one of your messed up CDs and rip a track to a .WAV file. Then, clean it up. After, rip that same track to .WAV file again. Play those two ,WAV files and hear for yourself.

At least Kansas City is in Kansas as well as Missouri. They could move to Kansas and still legitimately be called the Kansas City Chiefs. Two "New York" teams have their home field in New Jersey. They should be called the New Jersey Giants and New Jersey Jets. The only team that should be called "New York" is the Bills.

Ripping hard-to-play CD-Rs in a PC drive using Exact Audio Copy can allow you to rip that disc because it does multiple reads of problematic areas and can maybe get that data off. In my experience, it doesn't work often. I found that turning on burst mode helps but with burst mode on, you can get click-filled audio too.

Most solvents, alcohol, acetone etc. could damage the playback layer. The physical action of peeling it off could also affect it. I think I would use one that you'd be less unhappy damaging and trying alcohol first, acetone (some nail polish removers are pure acetone) second and see if that works.

Spinning a lot of Christmas tunes today... so far:

The science of the CD playback system says that this cannot be true. The 1's and 0's are converted to an analog signal. That's it. If the 1's and 0's are messed up beyond the ability of the error correction, you don't get different analog, you get no analog or noise (ticks, pops).

There have been several reports over the years of people washing CDs like this and having the label side and reflective layer wash away. After reading this, I stopped washing CDs.

GRP was a weird label. You never knew if you were getting smooth jazz or just plain jazz, even if the artists involved were skewered one way or the other. This looks like a good one though.

Classical Jazz Quartet - Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker (Vertical Jazz). Stefon Harris (vibes), Kenny Barron (piano), Ron Carter (bass) & Lewis Nash (drums). Very well done.

The problem with ripping or duplicating a CD-R with a label unbalancing it is that most duplication processes do it at speeds >>1X, which exacerbates the problem.

I merged @jimmyjrg 's topic with this one to get all of the interested parties in one place.

I have that John Patton session on a Canadian CD from 2007.

I have had one CD and several CDrs stop playing. The CDrs that failed were not burned by myself. They were sold as a regular CDs and I got a CDrs instead.