Scratched CDs.

A couple of my audio CDs have been scratched somehow, probably kicking
around in the cage. What does the FOAK reckon is the best way of polishing
out the scratches?

--
Malc
R1100RS old and tatty

You laugh at me because I am different
I laugh at you because you are all the same

 

Could you rip and re burn them or are they unplayable?

 

CDs? In a car? How quaint.

 

www.isohunt.com

 

Mer car polish, or T-Cut. Any slightly abrasive polish.

 

Warm the plastic up a little bit by sticking it in the microwave for a couple
of seconds, then give a quick rub with a J-cloth

 

Depends on the CD player. Some they work fine in, others not so well.

--
Malc
R1100RS old and tatty

You laugh at me because I am different
I laugh at you because you are all the same

 

Oh that's nothing. I only bought the player this year, it replaced a radio
cassette.

--
Malc
R1100RS old and tatty

You laugh at me because I am different
I laugh at you because you are all the same

 

It only cost me a hundred nicker in Halfords a few months ago for one
that plays MP3s off a USB stick.

 

Can't suggest anything that hasn't already been suggested, but if you
do go for a polishing wipe method, remember to wipe the CD radially,
never in a circle.

Personally I'd start simply with detergent and simply get the disc
clean, then, if that doesn't help, I'd try very fine abrasives
(toothpaste or T-cut) and work gently - you could embed abrasives in
the plastic if you overheat it. Having said that, ISTR Cane posting
something along the lines that you can't polish plastic, but if the
alternative is binning the CD, it's got to be worth a try.

Generally, avoid wiping CDs at all, but if you must, always outwards
from the centre. The reason is that a momentary glitch, as in crossing
a radial scratch, won't upset the tracking servo or data (the CIRC can
almost always fix short drop-outs in the data) but a tangential
scratch is 'seen' by the laser for longer and thus has more time to
throw the tracking servo and has more of a chance of making the data
uncorrectable (though it takes a lot to do this).

 

http://www.wikihow.com/Fix-a-Scratched-CD

Wash it first. - I have never needed anything else.
Make all rubbing (try for no rubbing) *radial*.
I pat it dry with a kitchen towel since I have hard water.

Make a copy if you can - second.

 

You can drill 2mm holes in a CD and it still plays perfectly.

 

Mine was 70 quid in Argos, does the same and SD cards as well

 

£40 from Aldi for one that does USB sticks, and SD cards as well as CDs and
MP3s on CDs. Though I have to say that the radio side of things isn't as
good as the radio I took out.

--
Malc
R1100RS old and tatty

You laugh at me because I am different
I laugh at you because you are all the same

 

Depends on the player; some are more robust than others, like portable
ones, for example. I doubt ours could have, with standard cheap mechs,
but we were running the focus & tracking servos in software and were,
to put it mildly, bandwidth-challenged. The last version of our CPU
had hardware accelerators to deal with the integral term (we used a
PID algorithm) but the bloody things didn't work, did they? Then MP3
became the Thing To Have and shortly afterwards the money ran out. We
could certainly play across a 1mm strip of electrical tape and
eventually sorted the standard Heavy Fingerprint pattern: that was
quite a challenge because it was a couple of centimetres wide.

 

The most important feature for me was the buttons all light up red to
match the rest of the dash.

 

I found that with mine, Radio 1 reception is bloody awful compared to
the factory fitted Blaupunkt I had in my Micra

 

Mine reflected the display in the windscreen, which was bloody
distracting at night.

 

Sounds like a step in the right direction.

 

Because I can. The theory is that the CIRC will fix 2.4mm gaps in the data
so I wanted to test it. Obviously not on an important disc.