aligning cd player heads

sorry if this is too off topic but I'm about ready to toss my 13 month old el cheapo desk top CD player because it won't read 75% of all disks. So Before I do, does anyone have any suggestions on how to realign the heads? I can see a pot on the reader arm, should I just twiddle, try, repeat or is there more method? thanks Lyle

The other part that gets worse with age is the motor bearing and spindle. If the disk develops too much wobble due to a bad bearing or sloppy disk algnment, the tracking servos can't handle the error.

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Paul Hovnanian     mailto:Paul@Hovnanian.com
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There was a man who entered a local paper\'s pun contest. He sent in ten
different puns, in the hope that at least one of them would win.
Unfortunately, no pun in ten did.

Assuming it's the *right* pot, anyone with a setup procedure would likely be scoping a relevant part of the circuit.

I suspect there'll be servo pots ( probably elsewhere ) and maybe this is a focus pot ?

If you're going to throw it anyway, there's no great loss fiddling with the thing.

Graham

Haven't visited in a while, but last time I was there,

had a large section on CD repairs. Dave McDonald Johannesburg

That'll be true for sure. Although some cheapies may be surprisingly reliable.

At a company I worked for they had a new swish phone system that played whatever we put in a CD player to ppl on transfer.

My colleagues simply bought the cheapest unit they find in the local Dixons / Currys ( a large UK retail chain dealing in what would once have been called 'brown goods' and 'white goods' ). It was a no brainer. It had to be on effectively

24/7 and if it failed in the 1 year guarantee period we'd get a free replacement !

It only cost about £50 anyway and easily outlasted its guarantee period. Now you can buy a DVD player for less than that amount too !

Graham

A long time back a colleague and I opened up a misbehaving Sony CD player belonging to a mate of his and our jaws dropped at the miniscule size of the pcbs inside. Aside from the mechanism and display it was about 2 large SMD chips and a PSU and some passives ! On single sided 'paper' boards too ! I think we cleaned something and it started working again. Again a no-brainer. It wasn't worth anything so tried mucking about to see if it makes it better.

I have a 'classic' CD player, a Denon DCD-1700. Won awards and stuff. It was the first CD player I heard that 'sounded right' and given the engineering inside it damn well should do ! One of the first to use oversampling for example. Unlike the modern ones you can pick up with your little finger, this one is actually

*heavy* !

It's so beautifully made that when it started playing up I had it serviced by the Uk distributor - fortunately nearby and an excellent company. Took it there and collected it in person. Cost no more than a cheapie replacement to get everything working fine again and it works fine still, about 15 ~ 16 yrs on from when it was made.

Graham

Holy smokes what a great site!!!! They even go into detail on methods to resurect badly scratched CD's. I reccommend that everyone who likes to tinker bookmark this site for future reference. Thanks Lyle

I had a scratched software CD from the lens hitting the disc and thought it was ruined. Had it polished out for $3 at a game store. Looks and plays like new. GG

How are your CD care and handling procedures? Are you letting your little brother play frisbee with them? Are they all covered with finger grease and/or chocolate? You can clean them with a soft, lint-free cloth and Windex; but wipe in a circular motion - never wipe one crosswise.

Good Luck! RIch

is

Put it up for sale in an auction and use the money to buy a new one - Especially if it is a "Leading Brand Name"; some sucker is bound to pay 50% of the cost of the unit in the shops. Then sucker will send it in for service and everybody is happy.

---Unless---

The problem is Copy Protection in which case the unit just cannot play with any of the modern, gabled, non-cd's pushed by the record companies. Then you will have to get your stuff from off the net - Itunes or Bit-torrent - and burn real CD's yourself. ;-)

That, Rich, is exactly the opposite of what I read many years ago. The opinion at the time was that radial marks are easier for the error correction to deal with. Circular marks can cause the servo to lock onto the new 'track'.

The commercial disc buffer took ALL the marks out and restored my $70 Partition Magic disc. Cheap ($3) and highly recommended.

Personally, I clean discs with warm water and dish detergent and dry with a terry cloth. GG

Hmmmmm... That might very well be what I heard, and disremembered; I do remember it being about the scratches/streaks. But, heck, every time I've got a 50-50 chance of getting it right, 90% of the time I get it wrong. ;-)

Thanks!! Rich