9 August 2005,
Hi,
If you are not doing so already,
it wouldn't be a bad idea to store some CD
and DVD players over the years along with your
archived
media.
Hardware like this should be able to sit unused
for
many years,(10-20+ ) especially if properly packaged
in its original carton. From my experience as a repair
technician, I would expect to have to do very little
service when it's used in the future. Perhaps you
might only have to put a drop of
light oil on the sled rail and on the spindle motor
bearing. Many units use a small rubber belt to
open/close
the drawer so the belt will stretch with time but is
usually easily replaceable and commonly available.
Personally, as Mr. Hess said I agree that the
optical disc drive format will be around for a long
time.
My guess is that there will be more problems with the
decoding of the bitstream than the electro-mechanics
of the hardware. Storage capacity on the discs and the
# of different file-types have increased dramatically
since the early CD machines 20 years ago.
So it seems cost-effective to store a couple of
machines which currently play your media correctly.
This just gives you backup in case future hardware
has problems reading the archived media.
This is applicable to both digital and analog
media.
Respectfully,
Chris
@eugene-audio