[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.