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Why do scratches appear on discs?

Although Cds and DVDs are extremely durable and convenient to use, they can be easily damaged through normal handling and abuse, use in inexpensive CD or DVD players, car CD changers or poorly designed CD cases.

While scuffed or scratched CD’s or DVD’s may still be playable the player is likely having a hard time decoding the sound, image or data due to the interference. This commonly leads to the disc sounding dull and lifeless or skipping and stuttering.

When scratches are removed from the surface of the disc, it allows the CD or DVD player to decode all the information without having to do numeros error correction procedures, which in turn makes the music or video flow properly and puts less stress on the player.

How are discs made?

A disc is made up of four layers. The first layer is the thickest and easiest to repair. However, the other three layers combined (reflective foil, lacquer, and graphic are only as thin as a human hair and offer little or no protection to the data beneath them.

Scratch damage levels…

Light Damage - Light damage is characterized by small, hairline type scratches. It can also contain light scuffs, marks and debris such as food or glue residue. This type of damage canno tbe felt when running your fingernail across the scratches.

Medium Damage - Medium damage is typically larger scratches than those in the light category. Medium scratches can be felt when running your fingernail across the scratch. You should be able to feel the scratch, but your fingernail should not stop at the scratch. More extensively damaged discs with many scratches on the disc will typically have one of two scratches that would fall into the Medium damage level.

Heavy Damage - This type of damage can be felt when you run your fingernail over the scratch and it stops in the scratch. This type of damage can be very severe.

What should you do?

Bring the disc straight to us! Even if your disc can not be recognised by your games console, PC, DVD player etc then do not worry, as long as the top of the disc (the section usually containing the graphics such as picture of artist) is not damaged then your disc should be repairable.

If your unsure as to whether or not your disc is repairable then feel free to bring it to us to find out.