My old audio-cdr's are starting to sound like vinyl records

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Seems like something weird has happened to them, I burned them when 10 years ago, used them a lot, didn't put them in cd-cases...

Now instead of constantly stuttering, glitching and skipping like you would expect a normal damaged audio-cd to do, they sound like f*****g oldschool vinyl records, got that grainy, hissy noise over them, they playback fine, no skipping, but they are all noisy, sometimes even completely distorted.

My mate tells me he has never heard of anything like this and I can't find anything about it on the internet.

Does anyone know if it's just because they are damaged? Because they don't skip at all and the discs themselves look normal too (a bit dusty tho).

Anyone else has this issue?

I thought that the audio of audio-cd's could not get altered that way since the discs are read only, but I guess that damage can do literally anything to them.

Get a CD washer- one of those little hand cranked things with the cleaning fluid- before playing them again.

Then report back to us if the problem is still there.

Have you listened to the same CD-Rs in a different CD player and with different earphones? I'd eliminate hardware problems first.

CD-R quality varies greatly. Are these CD-Rs a name brand? A no-name white-label brand? The cheap ones can have issues with the dye and silver backing. In fact, dome CD-Rs were so cheap that the backing actually peels and flakes off. If a cheap CD-R was not stored in a jewel case to protect it, it could have issues. I have never experienced anything like what you're describing, but I have had bad CD-Rs where a file wasn't readable here and there. I use the highest quality DVD media for backups. (Tayio Yuden, Verbatim, Ri-Data, and others.) I no longer use CD-Rs. The high-quality media lasts indefinitely if stored properly. I have data CD-Rs going back to the late 90s.

i've had to re-archive all my old [10+ years] CDRs onto newer media, sometimes repairs were necessary- they all had numerous drop-outs that sounded a lot like fine quasi-phonographic crackle/surface noise.

Crackling could be drop-outs due to damaged data.

Background hiss cannot possibly be due to damage to the CD-R and the cause is something else.

if you magnify a hissy audio waveform, you will see something that looks fractally like macro-scale crackle. on my oldest CDRs there is something akin to a hiss [in the segments that would still play].

I would be looking at a hardware issue. The only way the artifacts could have to do with the CDs themselves is if they were originally written to that way. Try a different sound system and speakers.

Something like Exact Audio Copier will test a CD as it rips, so you will get a detailed analysis of the number and type of read errors on the CDs. Storage is so cheap and player software so good that it is worth ripping them all to magnetic storage and locating new copies of anything that is corrupted.

Mind you that I left these cd-r's lying on the desk 24/7 without the case and with the sun shining on them for years.

A lot of those "oldies" have this hissy sound right now, but 1/4 of those do not, depends how much i used them during the old days.

Newer cd-r's definitely don't have them and yes, when cd-r's hiss, they hiss on every playback device and usually the first and the last track don't hiss, but all those between them do.

I used a lot of different brands too, so no, it's not related to just one brand, but they could be all crap brands tho, I don't know if they were really cheap for cd-r's.

And yes it sounds weird but they don't skip, like at all, ripping them results in almost no errors with EAC.

You may or may not be able to back the stuff up to 16b/44KHz .wav files to a spare HDD you might have laying around for long term storage. That being said, I think that the damage has already been done.

FWIW, there really isn't any form of CDR that is archive quality. --Analog tape when stored in proper condition will outlive even a glass master CD.

^^^
in 1967 at a meeting of the audio engineering society, it was described in a paper/presentation, that analog tapes recorded at 3&3/4 inches per second and below had "fugitive trebles" and suffered disproportionately from drop-outs. and many of my old cassette tapes [stored in air-conditioned low-humidity conditions for the decades] have drop-outs and muted trebles. aside from analog signals on tape, what about all those zillions of DATs and Umatic digital tapes that are now unplayable? were they ALL stored "improperly"? aside from regulated temperatures and humidity, what else is needed to "properly" store a magnetic tape? magnetic recording tape is too fragile to be a reliable archival medium, there are too many cases of stretched tapes, tapes with patches of emulsion gone, sticky-shed, splices gone bad, etc.