Although CDs and DVDs are extremely durable and convenient to use, they can easily be damaged through use on various players and abuse. You may be surprised by the amount of scratches found on your CD or DVD collection; this is generally caused by no fault of the end user. Common culprits are cheap CD or DVD players, in car audio changers, poorly designed CD cases, children, and another few hundred other creative ways.

Although the CD or DVD may still be playable, the player is probably having a hard time to decode the sound, image or data if the play surface of the disc is covered in scuffs and scratches. However, even the most sophisticated system cannot correct the effects of a surface scratch, which refracts the light beam, or gives a prism effect, causing the disc to skip or keep repeating itself. This generally leads to the CD sounding a little dull and lifeless or skipping or stuttering or the picture freezing.

If you remove the scratches from the surface of the disc, you allow your CD or DVD player to decode all the information without having run numerous error correction procedures, which allows the music or video to flow.

It is a bit like looking at your image through one of those distorted mirrors at the fun fair, luckily for you, CD and DVD players are built to compensate for this, but the downside is that it often causes the detail of the sound or image to become muddled.