confederate wrote:
cplusplus wrote:
Indeed. If DADC USA was pressing discs in a non-cleanroom, then PDO UK was pressing discs in the parking lot. 
Even their CDs were complete garbage. And I am unaware of any other plant in the world producing such faulty CDs.
I can live with a few speckles here and there as long as the sound is fine but I have seen many PDO UK discs with distorted Audio.
Confederate is right. By any properly normalised measure, PDO is by far the worst plant for LDs.
They were also responsible for a high proportion of CDs with disc rot, but the bad proportion is much lower than it is for their LDs.
The main mechanism for the deterioration appears to have been that because the information is stored so close to the top (label) side of CDs, the metals often reacted with chemicals in the paper booklets inside the jewel case. Storing the disc "upside down" (i.e. with the label side hidden) in the jewel case solved the problem. I became aware of this in about 1994 and since then stored my PDO CDs that way round and there has been no further deterioration. I have direct comparisons of discs made just months apart in the same factory (for the same publisher too) that clearly show the effect of which way round they were stored. Every today if the cd is playable (many are) it's worth flipping it over in the case to prevent it getting worse. My other observation is that a media player will often rip a rotted cd just fine even if a cd player produces garbage.
This goes for 5-inch cd-videos too. Just yesterday, I played a 5-inch CD-V made by PDO (Was (Not Was): Anything Can Happen (1988) [080 454-2]) and it's perfect. The seller that I got it from had kept a layer of plastic between the disc and paper booklet, saving the disc.
This rot mechanism is completely different from LD rot, so it speaks rather badly for the factory that they suffered from both!
The other thing to note is that a few disc publishers did actually try to do the right thing and had a scheme to replace rotted cds for free where possible. I had maybe a 8-10 replaced and the scheme ran for maybe ten years. No longer, alas.
