[hakfoo]

CDs seem to be pretty resilient compared to tapes, from my experience buying used media. A small percentage of CDs will be unrippable, but a fair number of tapes are torn or self-destruct, and the players can have tape-destroying failure modes, aside from being mostly collections of belts that inevitably stretch, melt, or snap. One I was fiddling with managed to wrap several metres of tape around the capstan shaft so tightly it had to be cut off with a penknife.

[pjc50]

VHS tapes seemed to be even worse at this. We had several dozen incidents of "tape stuck in player" and we were pretty careful with them. Fast-forward to the 2020s, when my wife has been trying to rip some VHS to computer, and it requires considerable babysitting of fragile tapes and players to get it to work reliably.

[SoftTalker]

Personally experince was that DVDs became unplayable way more often than VHS tapes, especially if kids had any part in the handling. It's all anecdotal but I really soured on CD/DVD media due to the apparent need for clean-room handling to keep them playable.

[hurryer]

CDs can crack pretty easily.

[Symbiote]

What do you do to crack a CD? Play frisbee?

I grew up with CDs and never knew of one cracking. With sufficient scratching it was possibly to get them the skip, but even friends who kept CDs unboxed in piles round the CD player didn't have this problem.

[hurryer]

Sit on them. Because it's inside a bag, or under a blanket.

Parent was talking that CDs are less tolerant of abusive handling.

[Symbiote]

OK.

There's a whole level of carelessness that never occurred to me as a teenager who grew up with CDs.

[lodovic]

No, but if you manage to scratch the aluminum foil layer on the backside, the CD instantly becomes useless. Or when you store cd's in large unboxed stacks, they can stick together, which can also damage the backside.

[rickdeckard]

> No, but if you manage to scratch the aluminum foil layer on the backside, the CD instantly becomes useless.

Which is/was pretty hard to do on PRESSED CD's as they were covered with a thick coating, and sometimes quite easy to do on CD-R.

> Or when you store cd's in large unboxed stacks, they can stick together, which can also damage the backside.

Also, I only ever experienced that on CD-R, never on pressed CDs.

And to be fair: If you store all your tapes unwinded on a large spool, they also might see some damage over time ;)

[lodovic]

Fair point, my experience is mainly with cheap CDR's. These eventually all became unreadable.

[thsksbd]

I agree. Sure CDs don't like to be sat on, but they don't tangle up like tape either.

Both are more stable than a modern counterfeit sd card from Amazon though :P

[pjc50]

It seemed to me the main risk was those CD cases with the little plastic fingers on the centre; they seemed to require a big force to get the CD in or out.