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Comment by Fr0styMatt88 | Hacker News Reader

I remember everyone saying that CDs were rated for 100 years but disc rot seemed to kill that idea.

It is fascinating seeing in the retro games space just how quickly some are dying. The Gamecube/Ps2/Xbox era is starting to fall to it and I have even seen a handful of Xbox 360/Ps3 games with this issue. Many collectors now request photo's of the discs being back lit to check the integrity before purchasing.

And yet there are also a lot of audio CD's from the 80's that are holding on. A big part of it would be the manufacturing quality and how in the name of efficiency and lower prices, some corner may have been cut.

This was my rationale for switching over to vinyl around 2007. Its audio fidelity is worse but its failure state is more acceptable to me.

For anything digital, having reduntant backups and error correcting codes makes much more sense than worrying too much about the medium. The theoretical longevity of your vinyl won't matter if your house burns down or if you accidentally throw out the dusty box they are packed in.

That said, if you just like the sound of vinyl and feeling of handling them then good for you and I'm not trying to rain on your parade.

I already said that I don't particularly like the sound, and hard drives, CDs, and records alike can all be lost in a house fire. Of those three media, one fails less arbitrarily and catastrophically.

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