New use for old CDs

[Big Frank]

I burned a couple of CDs this morning, but when I tried burning them from songs I saved as FLAC files, the first 3 were screwed up. I didn't check them until after I burned the first 2, and still didn't know what the problem was. Then I saved the songs as WAV files and burned another CD but the first song was missing. I made sure to include all of the songs on the CD and, fifth time's the charm.   It worked again the sixth time too. Now I have a CD for myself and one for my friend. It was Nativity In Black III - A Tribute To Black Sabbath. I already burned  Nativity In Black - A Tribute To Black Sabbath and Nativity In Black II - A Tribute To Black Sabbath for my friend, and now we'll both have all 3 albums.

I took the 4 bad CDs and put them in the microwave for 5 seconds. I heard it arcing after 3 seconds, but I really let them have it. This is how I erase CDs and DVDs. I normally just throw them in the trash, but thought I'd do something else with them. The bottom is shinier than  the top, so I put 2 CDs together with the tops facing each other and tied them up. Then I did the same thing to the other pair. The wind blows them around, but not well enough. I need to get some string or small cord to replace the twine I used. And I'll separate the pairs of CDs, and put them a couple inches apart. I put a used cup hook up today just to hang these on. It was already painted white which is the color of the wood it's screwed into, so that worked out.

When I was hanging them up I was thinking about the redneck wind-chimes one of my friends made with old ATV rear sprockets. He gave them to our other friend and they're hanging at his cabin up north. The thing on the bottom that catches the wind was too small to do anything, so my friend replaced it with a pizza pan. Now it's big enough to catch the wind! And it has a really nice sound when the horizontal sprocket in the middle hits the other sprockets. It's a tinkling kind of sound.

When I burn CDs I put them in paper pouches I make from typing paper. Sometimes I use Microsoft Paint to put the album cover on it, flip it over, and put the track listing on it. Then I flip it over again and print it. That's what I did today. Sometimes I write the album name on with an ink pen instead of wasting ink on a picture. If I don't want to print anything on it, I still find it easier to fold the paper to the right size using the template I made. So I'll print it blank except for the lines, just the way you see it. Here's what the 2 CD pouches I made today look like. It doesn't matter if you fold the sides in first, or the top and bottom. All you need to do is tape the sides together, but this time I taped the top and bottom flap too. I usually don't, since they're folded inside and it doesn't matter.

[alfsauve]

Egads.  People still use CDs?  How...  20th century.

Back in the day I'd just run a knife over the surface and put multiple long scratches in them.

Played with a 6' tall Christmas tree design made out of CDs and DVDs.  Then used red and green lasers with broad lenses and 3 LED spot lights set to color change pointed at the tree.  The disc were threaded on cord so they constantly moved, or twitched.  Set the whole thing back about 150' from the road.  Looked cool.  Didn't save any pictures sorry.

Funny when I went to work for the church they had a rack of VHS VCRs for duplicating.  They had just ceased that activity and had gone putting sermons/lessons on DVDs.  Not too many years later we abandoned that for on-line streaming/downloads.   Sort of skipped the thumb drive distro some places adopted for a short while.

[alfsauve]

While I was making a joke according to ChartR, CD sales peaked in 1999 and have been surpassed by vinyl records since 2012.

[Jim Kennedy-ar154me]

While I was making a joke according to ChartR, CD sales peaked in 1999 and have been surpassed by vinyl records since 2012.

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2024/03/27/vinyl-records-outsell-cds-for-the-second-year-in-a-row/

[Big Frank]

There used to be a store here in Flint called Stereo Center. They were just a few blocks down the road from me before they moved 2-3 miles into Flint TWP. That was a very long time ago, and when I searched online it looks like they had a couple other locations too before they closed. But when they were open, they had a listening room in the newer store so you could compare speakers, or play different stereos through the same speakers. That's where I bought my pair of Paradigm floor speakers. They're less than 8" wide, not counting the feet (like TAB? ), but 39" tall. My Pioneer "bookshelf" speakers, nearly 15" wide are setting right on top of them, bringing them right up to eye level at 65" tall per side. IIRC the Pioneer S-910 speakers weighed 63 pounds each with the original woofers in them because the magnets were huge. Stereo Center had tube power amps that audiophiles would pay thousands of dollars for, that also required a separate pre-amp. But my hearing, and my budget, didn't justify buying anything like that. The old store fixed my Pioneer speakers when they had woofer rot. And I remember that they were selling vinyl records there, but not your average run of the mill records. They had heavyweight vinyl (180-gram and and maybe 200-gram, instead of flimsy 120-gram or 140-gram), direct-to-disc albums, and half-speed mastered LPs. Heavier disks are thicker and less prone to breakage, and more importantly warping, one of good sound's enemies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-to-disc_recording

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-speed_mastering

[Sponsor]

[Jim Kennedy-ar154me]

I bought quite a few of those. Even back then they were up to $50.00 each. I have no idea of what they are worth today. Maybe I can retire, haha. I play them on a Thorens turntable and a high-end Audio Technica cartridge.

[Big Frank]

Cool.   I have a Pioneer PL 990 turntable. I think it also has an Audio Technica cartridge on it, but there's too much junk in front of the stereo cabinet to get a good look at it. The PL 990 is a replacement for my Pioneer PL L1000 or PL L800 (whichever it was) linear tracking, quartz phase-locked loop, direct drive turntable I bought when I was stationed in Germany. A lot of guys I knew there had pretty good stereos. We didn't have to pay any import tax on the stuff we bought on post, and the prices were great. My Pioneer turntable was Champagne Gold color. So was my Pioneer SX-9 receiver, and Pioneer dual-well auto-reverse cassette deck. All of the Pioneer stuff came in various levels like 6, 7, 8 and 9, or 600, 700, 800, 900 and 1000. Mine was all top of the line or one step below it, like 9 or 900. There was another Pioneer turntable I think was a step above mine that you could stack other components on top of. When you pushed a button, a drawer opened so you could put the record in, then the drawer closed and the record started playing when you hit the button again. Someone working at the store told me they were discontinuing the model, but all they did was make everything silver color for the new model year.

Half of the motor on my old turntable looked like kind of a big gear or flower shaped wire on a printed circuit. The metal platter sat on the drive shaft, which was also the spindle you put the record on. Direct drive, no belts to slip or break. The tone arm was powered by a linear induction motor, like a maglev bullet train, or the Wedway PeopleMover they had at Walt Disney World when I was a kid. When the arm was up, you could give it a little push to either side by the cartridge, and that triggered the motor to move the base of it to line the arm up perfectly perpendicular to it's track. The grooves in the record trying to pull the stylus to the side was enough to trigger the linear induction motor to move the tonearm. Record molds are cut with an arm that goes straight across, not swinging in an arc, so it played the records straight across, the same way they were made. A regular swivel type tonearm played at constantly changing angles, and only got the stylus lined up straight for a moment in the middle of the record. I really liked that dual-well tape deck too. I could copy tapes with the press of a button. And I could set it to play both sides of one tape, then both sides of the other. And while the second one was playing, I could take the first tape out and put a third one in so the music never had to stop. But my roommate from Bay City, not far north of here, had a reel to reel tape deck. He copied whatever songs he wanted off of records onto a reel, and at the slowest speed one of his mix tapes lasted 8 hours IIRC. When we wanted to party (every weekend) it was Wild Dog who supplied the tunes for us. Played though a pair of Bose 901 Series IV direct/reflecting speakers. My receiver had a pair of bars on the back, like rods bent into 3 sides of a square, with insulation in the middle. You can leave them in, or pull them out to separate the pre-amp and power amp in case you wanted to add one to the system. The receiver on this site doesn't have them, but you can see where it says pre amp out and power amp in, right above the weird looking AM antenna. In the upper right rear corner is where you can switch it from 240V to 220V to 120V to 110V, and from 50 to 60 Hertz to match the current just about anywhere in the world. 

https://www.usaudiomart.com/details/649508891-pioneer-sx9-receiver-nice/images/2200457/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-locked_loop

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeopleMover_(Magic_Kingdom)
 


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQMBh9ibDRA


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2kFPFnhu2Y