I don't know if this is the right part of the forum for this topic. I was debating whether I post in the laserdisc section or the laserdisc player technical part of the forum. I chose this part of the forum because the technical part of the forum seems to be more focused on laserdisc players and not issues with the discs themselves. Any ways, to get to the topic at hand. I recently purchased Lost Boys, The (1987) [12007] for around 15 dollars off eBay. This laserdisc plays flawlessly until the end credits when it gets to the second song in the credits. It starts to have audio skips and at this time I'm having a brain fart so I can't remember if it was having any visual issues. Either way I would like to know what constant audio skipping means on a laserdisc. Is it a warped laserdisc or is it laserdisc rot? Or could it be either? My second question is could this get any worse? I don't have any plans on sending this back to the seller because the movie played all the way through without any issues other than the credit issues.

Lost Boys, The (1987) [12007]

Sounds like warped disc
Place it tight with other lds vertically and with time will get better

Is there any dirt on the edge of the disc, even sometimes the glue will be on the edge of the play surface and make issues.
Also could be a number of things.

When you put the disc in at side B first and go to the same spot will it still skip???

try playing discs the other way around, side B first then have the player flip to side A then it narrows down if its the player or disc
a little.

That trick works on some of my warped laserdiscs. You think my Panasonic LX-H670 is defective? That's strange because most movies it plays flawlessly without me doing the play B side before A side trick. I'd say about 75-80 percent of my collection plays fine without doing any of that.

The only way to know for sure if the disc or the player is the issue would be to play this disc on another player to see if the issue occurs on it as well.

This could be a mastering issue on the disc itself as I did have a copy of Robinson Crusoe On Mars that had video issues toward the end and all my players couldn't play through it. Also, my copy of Vertigo (AC3) has issues playing toward the end on the CAV supplemental material but only on my ProScan player. All my other players play it fine so the ProScan probably needs a slight adjustment to correct the problem. Otherwise, the player plays everything else completely fine like 98% of the time.

Laser rot should never, in my opinion, affect overall playback performance unless it's very severe. Also, a warped disc could have an issue but it has to be extremely warped and most disc are never completely flat anyway.

My reference disc for issues like this: Goldeneye: Special Edition (1995) [ML105544]. Chapter 42, 56 to 59 minute marks.

I had a disc like this, at the 59.40 mark there would be a skip, it played fine for years but somehow it was at the end of the shelf
and started skipping at that end, so I put it in the center and then it plays fine now.

While rot is usually impossible to see as are many other manufacturing defects, warping is easy to check. You do it using the same methods you’d use to check the flatness of anything. In this case I’d say find a super flat surface (could be very hard for some, consider making one I guess) and set the disc on it. If you can’t already see it’s warped by now make a feeler gauge out of paper about the same thickness as the label. If you press on the label so that the disc is for sure sitting flat in the center, can you slide the feeler gauge under the edge of the disc? You should be able to and with nearly equal resistance all around the edge. Flip it over to double check. If the paper slides in and out with the same resistance all around then the disc is flat. If it sticks in one place, it’s warped there.

Yeah honestly sometimes it is really hard to tell if they are warped. I check without playing the disc by looking at the side of the disc. Any major warping is visible when I do that, however I recently played 1941 (1979) (Uncut) [42343] the other day on my CLD-D503 (my travel player ) and it is ever so slightly warped where frames around 39,000 started skipping. I put a bunch of heavy books on it and it played fine the next day. I left the second disc as is (also skipped on the CLD-D503). I just tried it on a player I just aligned and it played without issue. I need to service my CLD-D503.

Anyway: no laserdisc is perfectly flat, and the hardware was engineered with that in mind. The disc needs to be at an acceptable level of flatness and the player's adjustments need to be within spec. Also you can get skipping like this at the end of a disc if centering is off.

The trick is to always store your discs as vertical as possible. If you have discs leaning on your shelves and there is weight on them (like a stack of discs leaning against a vertical surface), you can get an warp along the edge - I call it a ripple warp. When you spin it on your finger, you can see the edge of the disc wiggle back and forth. If this is too extreme, the pickup cannot track it quickly enough and you can get banding in the video, skipping, distorted audio and so on.

As is discussed here, perfectly vertical and pressed between other discs stored fairly tightly on a shelf will usually flatten discs back out. Do not store discs flat. I've seen the seams in jackets create pinch warps on discs at the bottom of the stack - especially in gate-fold and tri-fold jackets.

I think moving stuff around once in a while helps too.