There is a What Hi-Fi piece doing the rounds about disc wallets and it is worth reading if you have shelved the cases and put everything into sleeves, which a lot of us have once the collection outgrows the room.
Three failure modes. The act of sliding a disc into a tight sleeve puts fine scratches on the data surface, every single time, which is a slow drip rather than a disaster. Cheap PVC sleeves can go soft in high heat and bond to the disc, and that one is not recoverable - a wallet left on a car seat in summer is the classic, but with the heatwaves we keep getting, an upstairs room will do it. And a warped disc does not just fail to read, it can chew the loading and spin mechanism in your player, so the cheap storage decision becomes an expensive one.
The fix is dull and cheap: sleeves made of polypropylene, polyethene, felt, microfibre or netting rather than whatever came free with the wallet, and keep the thing out of sun and out of cars.
One thing in the article contradicts itself, worth flagging. It warns that standing a wallet on its end loads the weight of every disc onto the ones at the bottom, then in the tips section says to store it standing up. My reading is that standing up is right - upright is discs on edge, same principle as records, whereas flat stacks the full weight onto the bottom disc face. But I would rather say that out loud than repeat both.
Anyone actually lost a disc to sleeve melt, or is that more theoretical than real?
Three failure modes. The act of sliding a disc into a tight sleeve puts fine scratches on the data surface, every single time, which is a slow drip rather than a disaster. Cheap PVC sleeves can go soft in high heat and bond to the disc, and that one is not recoverable - a wallet left on a car seat in summer is the classic, but with the heatwaves we keep getting, an upstairs room will do it. And a warped disc does not just fail to read, it can chew the loading and spin mechanism in your player, so the cheap storage decision becomes an expensive one.
The fix is dull and cheap: sleeves made of polypropylene, polyethene, felt, microfibre or netting rather than whatever came free with the wallet, and keep the thing out of sun and out of cars.
One thing in the article contradicts itself, worth flagging. It warns that standing a wallet on its end loads the weight of every disc onto the ones at the bottom, then in the tips section says to store it standing up. My reading is that standing up is right - upright is discs on edge, same principle as records, whereas flat stacks the full weight onto the bottom disc face. But I would rather say that out loud than repeat both.
Anyone actually lost a disc to sleeve melt, or is that more theoretical than real?
