Hi there
Please can you help?
I recently acquired a player and the normal 12" silver Laserdiscs play well no issues.
However, playing the 5" and 8" gold CD video discs seem to cause small flicking black horizontal interference lines.
Apart from this discs play through fine and the sound is good and have no visible black disc rot areas.
Could this issue still just be the age of the discs? Or does this player use a different process to play these discs?
Also, just to add, I have played a couple of Gold 12" CD Video discs and they are fine apart the sections where the disc has sadly visibly deteriorated.
Please advise
Thanks very much
Paul

Virtually all PAL 5” CDVs have rotted. That’s quite probably your issue.

Yeah, just sounds like they are rotted.

Yeah, sorry to say mate but the discs have started rotting.

Thanks very much Guys
I feared as much.
It's a shame because the discs look mint!
Cheers Paul

Any rot will never be something you can see w/ the naked eye; it’s all microscopic so the only way to test it is to just play the disc.

I think I have a collection of 20 or so CDVs’ and I think at least eight or more have rotted pretty bad (and they are all NTSC discs pressed in Europe oddly enough).

Any of the PDO Blackburn pressed ones whither PAL or NTSC are usually rot hell.

I had quite a number years ago & 60 to 70 percent of them had playback issues, most pretty serious.

Some interesting stuff on some of them so rather sad that most are in such a state.

Yeah. It’s sad. The UK market would be where I’d actually want CDVs from but I never got any back in the day because they are PAL and now I never will because they are all dead.

I would love True Faith, Doctorin’ the Tardis, etc...no JP pressings to save us either.

Thanks Guys for all your comments and advice.
I think I will be sticking to Laserdiscs from now on!
Cheers Paul

PS If all the CDVs are pretty much rotted these days it seems amazing that some of the music titles are so expensive on the collectors market?
I appreciate some of these discs have never made it to DVD, but if you cant play them properly, it seems pointless to me.

Thanks Guys for all your comments and advice.
I think I will be sticking to Laserdiscs from now on!
Cheers Paul

PS If all the CDVs are pretty much rotted these days it seems amazing that some of the music titles are so expensive on the collectors market?
I appreciate some of these discs have never made it to DVD, but if you cant play them properly, it seems pointless to me.

Are you perhaps looking at listings that have been on sale for years?

Some sellers don't have the equipment to play them & as the can look visually perfect to the naked eye to them it is very good or near mint condition.

Quite often if you ask them to test it the reply often is that they cannot test but it "looks fine" so all the risk is on the buyer, more often than not they are duff discs - try asking for a refund when it is a bad one!

Even back in the day the PDO Blackburn plant had real issues with the production of those discs, they had a pretty poor reputation with many discs on various formats that they manufactured - lots of stuff lost in rot hell now.

I have a lot of NTSC CDVideo's that work fine. Laserrot is usually random colored speckles. You may have spindle motor rotation issues with the lighter discs where the larger 12 inch disc is like a gyroscope and the weight holds the speed better. But as others say it could be laserrot. Put in a CD and it will have a lot of dropouts if the spindle rotating speed is the issue.

Not all CDVs are rotted, just ones pressed at a particular plant and they happened to do most PAL CDVs. Japanese and American CDVs are probably %95+ not rotted.

And yeah, I agree it is pointless to collect broken discs but chances are most people buying expensive CDVs will never play them and probably don’t have a player. They’re just completist fans.

Perhaps should have pointed out above but the CDVs that I had were all PDO pressed & most were problematic, came with a collection bought years ago & I was so disappointed when most were so bad as there were some interesting discs among them.

At one time so called "important visitors" including artists & record company personnel were allowed to go into any part of the Blackburn plant including the clean rooms. There were many pressing/quality problems & around mid '89 visitors were stopped from going into the clean rooms & had to view the process through the glass screens. They (PDO Blackburn) claimed that the problems were "organic" & stated that "we would get good pressings one week, but then not the next". The fail rate was apparently shockingly high & Polygram went public about the high returns rate & poor sales due to the problems which more or less forced changes at the Blackburn plant - ironically Polygram was an offshoot of PHILIPS at the time & that may have been the reason they spoke so openly about the issues at that time.

Thanks again Gents.

All interesting information, I'm learning all the time!

Ill try the CD spinning test on the player and look out for NTSC discs then. Avoid the UK PAL ones!

Is there a way of telling whether the disc was made at the dodgy (Blackburn) plant? Does it say on the sleeve or disc?

All the best

Paul

My guess is that it would say PDO in the mint marks.

But good luck on asking a seller who bought it for a quarter to sell it at a profit to find what mint marks are.......

I really don't want to defend the PDO plant - they were truly awful, for CDs as well as LDs - but it's not true that every disc from there is useless or that they should be avoided completely.

I have dozens of PDO discs and only 2 or 3 are actually unplayable. When it's unplayable, it's generally because it's a disc with digital sound (i.e. a CDV) and the sound is intolerable.

Virtually all of my PDO discs, whether PAL or NTSC, are rotted to some extent, but it's usually just a softening of the picture and some speckles. If it's interesting content, then they can still be interesting and collectable items.

I have <checks> three 5-inch PAL CDVs made at PDO Blackburn and they all play ok-ish. Played as CDs (yes, they play in CDs players too) they seem absolutely fine. The one 8" PDO disc in my collection plays without issue.

By the way, in the case of CDs made at PDO Blackburn, it was really beneficial to store them upside down in the jewel case, so that the clear plastic touches the paper insert rather than the label side. I have examples in my collection that were stored that way for over 25 years and they are completely perfect, whereas the ones stored conventionally (in my wife's collection for instance) are bronzed all over sometimes with visible transparencies right through the disc and occasionally unplayable.

Interesting fact, guess they would "gas out" so they wouldn't trap and damage the top layer.

Also I guess they would put the discs in the case like that due to the players that read from the top, I know there is a Pioneer Elite CD
player where you have to put the discs upside down.
And it would be easier to just open and drop in to play rather than flip them each time.

The PDO Blackburn plant did produce many good LDs with lots of titles having whole runs with apparently no issues at all, got quite a few of them. Sadly though they also produced lots of really poor LDs (& other format discs) & some titles are now basically lost in rot hell.

Things did appear to improve by the early '90s but there were still bad runs from them, always worth checking PDO discs in any format if you can.

That’s truly bizarre and I can’t explain it. It shouldn’t be outgassing since most CDs are stored vertically and CDs barely outgas at all so...this can only be because...they used top lacquer that is attacked by ink?!? Makes no sense...