I always thought Akai gear was massively underrated. Always built well, sounded decent and most of their stuff I've seen now still works. The brand is now just a badge on cheap suitcase turntables and micro systems.
"Eye pattern". The second I saw you scoping that and knowing a good from bad eye pattern, that's the hallmark of someone knowing what they're not only talking about but doing too! How refreshing. Thank you.
I always like your vids on CD players. I remember when I was at junior school back in the early 1970s and talking to my friends about the future of music and a laser that will play records at some point. Great vid as always.
Yes, and we did indeed get a turntable that read the grooves with a Laser (Development started in late 80s..Continued for two decades). It was and is useless and extremely expensive.
That unit is 1983 in Tralee, kerry, Ireland. I purchased an AKAI Stereo system back then from my local Hi-FI Dealer, Hugh Culloty, Still also there. Namely AKAI Tuner AT-A102L, Akai CD Player CD A301 and an AKAI Amp AM A-302 along with a pair of Tensi 3 way active crossover speakers containing a 12 inch, 4 inch and Dome tweeter. All still working correctly in Sept 2022. Only thing is the incandesent bulbs for the "LCD" display are not working. Must replace. But 29 years unbroken service is not bad going at all. Great manufacturer.
Akai proves better lasting than many higher regarded brands. When it's an Akai the metalwork is not rusty, capacitors are still lively and bulbs usually work. Heck, even dial strings in Akai tuners often remain strong as new.
Well the bulb blew on this one. Left it on all night and this morning the display is dark. Looks like another video to replace that bulb. Incandescent? LED? Tough choice.
Trying to find the digital output tp on my Cambridge Audio Azure 640C mk 2 CD player. Service manual for that unit plain sucks, don't know if you have worked on one of these. Main problem people report on the internet when unit displays "no play" is capacitors in the servo drive board that need replaced. Can sometimes get it to play by doing a full power down, unplug from wall, wait for things to equalize, then power back up and it will work for awhile. Looking at the eye pattern should give me a clue as to when it is failing to read.
A little tip from me: to replace incandescent lights I use old Christmas tree lights. (They are still sold and come in two bulb sizes) work from 5v at 60ma +/- to full light at 11v / 12v at 160ma. The intensity can be regulated with a resistor and they shine in all directions unlike LEDs.
Great video! I found an old Pioneer cdx-1 car cd-player recently. When I insert cd it gives me only “disc set” and then rejects the disc. Where do I have to start from in order to try to repair it?
Looking in to those hard to see places would be a good use of the bore scope you demoed. I appreciate your tidbits of information you add in to your videos
Setting up this CD player takes me back to trying to setup Laserdisc players. Both side players were always a compromise between side A and B. Interesting information on the difference between stamped and CD-R discs. A well setup player will track even poor or damaged discs.
That's correct when you can play these low output cdrs which are the modern desks that are pretty much silver on both sides then you know the CD player is set up properly because with the low output the error count is obviously going to be higher if I player is out of spec it will typically start to skip
@@12voltvids I had similar experience with laserdisc players, you knew if you had setup issues if they could just about read a laserdisc, but wouldn't read a CD on the models with dual drawers. The better players from Japan were better at tracking poor pressings. The laser in the Hi-Vision HLD-X9 could even play discs with laser rot that other players failed to play.
i have a mk2 version of the same cd player i have a problem i have cleaned the dust on the lens but still no solution i have to repeat it 3/4 times when i press the play button but then mostly it starts to read the cd it doesn't read at the first time and a song like 3,4,5 in any album When I try to start it, it doesn't come out of the line, sometimes after pressing the play button several times, the cd is read again, or the cd spins and the slider opens again. What is the problem, how can I fix it?
Does the clarity of the eye pattern on the scope says anything about the state of the pick up? I have 3 CD players, one of them has a very sharp eye pattern, while the other two have a rather blurry eye pattern. They all play CDs just fine, but I found that a bit interesting.
I still have a couple mint vintage Sony CD players. A CDP-302ES and CDP-102. Also have a Technics SL-P3 and Kyocera DA-310cx. Tough to kill those old players, although they don't get much use anymore.
Hi, sir, you have an oscilloscope galvanically isolated from the mains, or as it is solved, it is necessary when measuring amplifiers and so on, I am a beginner and I would like to understand here, thank you for any statement
I noticed you added external voltage to the sled motor without desoldering a wire to it. I did the same thing to a Linn cd player (1.5v applied) and now it's stopped turning. It had some fault where the sled motor was stuck in reverse in the home position whilst constantly turning. Have i blown the sled drivers with only 1.5v?
Hey Dave I sometimes do a bump test just to see if when the machine recovers if it picks up at the exact spot of when the bump occurred. I have a portable Emerson boom box type that actually searched every track until it finds it. It didn't as I understand estimate the spot on the disk and quickly move the pickup to the approximate location and then find the start of the track. The VERY 1st CD player I ever owned. I later purchased another boom box type an RCA, it had a different system than the Emerson and it did an approximation of where the track was and quickly found the track compared to the Emerson. You worked on a Yamaha that had the EXACT same mechanism they used in my Emerson boom box. I don't recall if that Yamaha zipped straight to the track or not that was quite a few videos ago LOL. The circuits and ICs used to control the mechanism certainly make a difference in my experience. The Emerson really impressed me when it got bumped because the timer would blink until it recovered and would start playing at the EXACT spot the bumping caused the loss of tracking. The others I have didn't they simple refocused and started playing from that spot. That was intriguing to me LOL.
I have several players that would work only as headphone players, because any bass at all makes them skip. I do the finger tap on top of the cabinet as a test. I wonder if it means the laser is tired?
@@zulumax1 I have several players that would work only as headphone players, because any bass at all makes them skip. I do the finger tap on top of the cabinet as a test. I wonder if it means the laser is tired? ME: Hello Zulumax1, This is my thoughts on your question and of course from my own experience working/ tincking with CD players, I am by no means an expert. I think many factors come into play concerning a CD players ability to track properly. One factor of course is obvious the quality of the disk being played like scratches. CDs are made made very similar to the way vinyl is made. Molten polycarbonate is injected into a negative master containing the pits and lands. It is only good for so many copies (I forget the number) afterwards it would contain too many errors. How CDs are made. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-O3FQzwNzUE4.html Now it could be a CD towards the end of the batch that the master negative is beginning to produce too many errors. 2. The environment the CD player is in for example dusty location, next to a kitchen were greasy foods are cooked, in a smoker's home all of these can eventually work the the inside of the optics in the laser pickup. For an analogy like trying to look through a foggy window, the above will make it impossible for the photo diodes (what the laser is reflected to) to collect the ones and zeros that the disk contains. 3. Of course a tired laser could be the problem as your original question you asked about. 4. It could be a bearing on the spindle motor that is worn out. 5. The disk could be extremely out of balance, causing severe tracking errors. Normal speeds for audio CDs is 500 (inner) to 200 (it could be 250) (outer) RPM. 6. The electronics that drive the mechanism could be poorly designed as well. 7. It could also be a poorly aligned optical pickup when it was manufactured, like a turning mirror slightly out causing the limits of the circuitry to be reached. 8. Definitely vibration can cause the servo lens to loose its locked tracking and the system will have to establish it again thus interrupting the audio. Incase you didn't know the lens is on a springy suspension and it is controlled be electro magnets one set to move the lens up and down and one set of coils to move towards and away from the spindle (unless it is on the Philips mechanism which most were on a swing arm). Bass would definitely cause the servo lens to loose tracking if the CD player was too close or wasn't on a solid floor. Another possibility could be the shock absorbers the mechanism is mounted in typically rubber that would deteriorate over time. So those are a few of my personal observations and thoughts about possible hiccups that can cause less than desired operation.
@@darinb.3273 Yes, I have oiled the top bearing on a spindle motor to fix one unit, another had lint that became impacted around the lens inhibiting it’s movement. Don’t use one of those lens cleaners which looks like a CD with a little brush on it, that caused the above mentioned compacting of debris around the lens. The.Denon I repaired had a plastic arm which holds the magnetic puck above the spindle motor became distorted due to plastic shrinkage caused by age of the plastic. Myriad of possible causes of loss of tracking as you pointed out.
@@zulumax1 Indeed I hear ya about the disk cleaners (worse case) it will destroy the lens completely (severely scratching it) Best case it stirs dust into the inner portions of the laser pickup possibly rendering it unable to read a disk at all. In fairness there are some brushed CD cleaning disks that won't harm the lens there are approximately 8 VERY TINY VERY SOFT brushes that potentially could remove dust from the top, however the disk is spinning as this dust is cleaned off so where does it go? Well of course it whirls around till it gets to a place that only a specialist that can take the pickup apart clean it and reassemble it lining the mirrors back in the proper place and while one could pay that cost said person could buy three or four replacement CD players. I took a Sanyo pickup apart and it NEVER read another disk LOL. so the alignment of the turning mirror is ABSOLUTELY critical in its position. I wonder now if I zapped one or more of the photo diodes. it would go home and ignored the home position switch, keeping the sled motor running which resulted in the gear slipping over the flexible rack gear mounted the laser. I think it was a Sanyo mechanism. Yamaha used the same one in a unit that Dave worked on. It had the motor gear split which made it bind at the crack. Plastic over metal is NEVER a good thing they don't expand and contract the same which eventually leads to a split running the length of the metal shaft. That causes a extra space between teeth were the crack is making it bind up the sled motor is then given so much power once it over comes the resistance it over shoots the minor movement it needed and now it skips way forward or stops playing all together because the laser can't align itself to the spot because of the gear crack. It is ugly LOL. My mom gave me an Awia that the chip that drove the sled motor couldn't over come a resistor ring inside the motor. I took the motor apart took the ring off and it works perfectly now it wasn't stuck it moved easily by hand so the lubrication was fine. The symptom was unable to read a disk which it actually was but the laser pickup wasn't reading the table of contents because the sled motor drive chip got weak because of the earlier mentioned resistor ring inside the motor. I used a tiny disk cap like they used to put on smal motors to stop electrical brush noise. If you decide to check the servo lens use a bright light and a powerful magnifier, if it is cloudy/foggy you'll see it.
RU-vid found that it violated their TOS as a dangerous video so they pulled it not me. I appealed it but they said because it circumvents copy protection it is a violation of their TOS. I can't even tell you the name but it starts with "wonder" and ends with "fox". If you search that you will probably find one that i demonstrated how to convert video formats with it but not how to download yt videos as that crosses the line aparantly.
I did a demo of the Sony CD system around 1985 at the CBC. We generally found the disks sounded very harsh and brittle in sound quality at the time. The media at that time on the CDs were direct transfers from the original master tapes which usually had a boosted top end which would be "buffed off" of the vinyl pressing masters during the process of producing the vinyl disks. A few years later CBC Vancouver started a network radio program called Disk Drive where the concept goal was to play CDs only during the show. It took a few years before we were able to fully avoid the use of vinyl on the show as these were the early days of CD technology. We used Studer CD players which would often fail where a Sony audition player would play the disk without 'fails' or 'skipping'. This became more of a problem as the mass production of CDs increased. The error correction of the Studers was good to about 80% with software upgrades but the error rate on mass produced CDs were well below the accepted technical standards reading sometimes as low as the mid-60 percentile. We eventually converted to Technics pro CD players that solved most of these problems. Disk Drive with Jurgen Gothe aired for over 20 years on CBC Radio 2 (FM service).
Early CDs were produced with analog tapes that had been equalized for vinyl. Record companies were cheap. Proper digital recordings by Telarc, GRP ect sounded fantastic. Also early CD players with early DAC had a bit of a harsh sound. The tda 1540 used in early CD players was a 14 bit DAC. CDs were sampled at 16 bit. The tda 1541 was much better. Sony has very good DAC on their players.
@@12voltvids Not when you were live coast to coast on the radio. Very frustrating and nerve shattering. Especially when you had no control or warning. At least with vinyl you could take a look at the platter and see if there was any visible damage or stylus wear. With CDs visually they looked the same whether flawed or perfectly manufactured. And we were playing mostly classical music disks so the expectation was that they were manufactured at the better plants.
@@chriscutress1702 most of the disks sold in Canada were manufactured at that shitty cinram plant. It affected many players and we would get players in that the complaint was skipping. It was usually the high end players that had problems and the cheap ones would play fine. Go figure. Many early DVD players had similar issues. Sony's too of the like had a compatability issue with many kids disks. I remember one very well. Veggie tales with the talking vegetables. Customers high end es DVD player refused to play. Changed the pickup, spindle motor ext. Put 500 in parts into this 1500 piece of shit. Played every other disk fine just these ones that played perfectly on the cheapest player. Now I know what you are going to say, just the customer to use a cheaper player. Fine now the customer wants his 1500 back for the high end player that won't play his kids disks. Very frustrating. Sent it to Sony, they never did get it going. Said the disks were out of spec sorry. But they played fine on a 150 player and there was the problem. Customer really wants money back now and it threatening shop with lawsuit. Going to sue the store that sold him a defective on his eyes player. Glad to be out of that business. No wonder the owner had a stroke.
@@gianlucamazzoni1672 just telling you what the factory alignment disks cost back in the 80's. There was a special jig required too, that cost 1750.00! Needless to say digital servos made these unnecessary and obsolete. I still remember the shitstorm that happened when the Jay guy ordered to do CD work arrived with a bill of $1,700. The boss damn near shit a brick, and I got ripped a new one. I had no idea what the test jig cost I was told that one was required for me to do warranty work so I told Panasonic to send me one it had no idea that it was going to cost what it did. I figured because I was a warranty servicer that they would send me the equipment to do warranty work but nope they charged us for it and we never made the money back on servicing because they paid $50 per unit to service under warranty so in all the time that we had to fix those models that require that jig we never even came close to breaking even on the costs of the test jig. The next year all the CD players use digital servos and the test jig was no longer needed so once the old units were out of warranty people weren't fixing them they were tossing them for a newer cheaper better players.
@@gianlucamazzoni1672 yes it will get you in the ball park. The test CDs had specific errors burned in for fine tuning , and disks with wobble and escintricity errors ect. So the player could be set up to handle scratched of poorly made disks. There were tons of crap disks made by cinram in the 80s.
I love CD players. Its my main audio format. If I was more interested in music and had a bigger collection I could see myself drooling over an ipod but with only 3 shelves of CD's I'm not nearly there yet. Besides I prefer the interface of a CD player to a touchscreen or iPod wheel any day.
iPod? Those are 20 years old now! I still have a gen7 160 gig iPod, waiting for it to die. I use an SD memory card for the car, it does have a CD player, but guess where they put it? In the glove box! and it is a single player!
Simply because CD is , and was the very last uncompressed audio format. Everything we’ve had since involving computers and ipods have compressed sound files which will NEVER sound as good as a full range CD digital recording
@@GBOAF216 lots of formats better than CD. Some claim retrieval of files from a hard drive to have less read errors than an optical drive. Reading a CD from a short wavelength laser, such as the violet of blu-ray, which has a smaller focus spot, produces less read errors than a red laser, or infrared long wavelength laser. Not sure if it is true, but optical storage is not perfect.
@@zulumax1 yes I get that, a lot of the quality comes from the jitter accuracy of the DAC, was a lot of work done by the ‘nerd/geek’ fraternity to get the timing accuracy spot on with high end CD decks, I myself tweaked certain Philips and Denon decks to get a ‘closer to analogue’ sound from these 1 & 0’s streams….. all good fun… all about the data accuracy. So I guess a solid state memory chip with a super clock and digital filter will be the best option?? Discuss…..
@@GBOAF216 Just repaired a Denon DCD-1560 from 1989, has dual mono DAC and weighs 40 lbs. Probably one of my favorite vintage players, or the Sony CDP-302es from 1985. Always liked the Denon or Sony ES line myself. You also need a good sound card in your computer which is not built on the motherboard. Digital noise produces jitter and the recordings will sound poor. Any digital playback device can only sound as good as what you feed it, including an iPod.
Judging from the Sony chips and analogue filter, it looks like this Akai's a second cousin of my Ferguson CD-03 - itself an OEM variation on Sony's own CDP-102. The Ferguson's still a tidy little performer, with one proviso: if there's a speck of dust on the CD, it'll skip. In that respect, my rock-steady old Marantz CD56 (bought in 1984) wins hands down. CD players of that vintage were usually built up to a standard, not down to a price - it took manufacturers a few years to work out how to cut corners!
related to my past post,old zenith tuber was on the fritz,described which model it was,how the pic was scarmbled,your prediction,'I see a big screen tv in your future',,,,,,,,,the zenith lives again,,,, watching jurassic park strikes back in espanyole,,noice pic,problem was the old radio shack video amp was open,,,,,,,,another radio shack device brought the signal back to nice quality,,oo raah,
You do realize i was being sarcastic right. That's like someone saying my car won't start what's wrong. Scrambled pix could be anything. How am i supposed to know from a vague question what the problem is, but s definite fix is a new TV. That fixes it every time.
Well it coped well with the 100 track disk, the firmware seemed ready for odd disks. If all lasers were as good as that one. Perfect looking eye, another ideal use of the analog scope. Digital would have made a mess of that pattern.
I get everything for free here. People just throw this stuff away. I haven't spent a dime on equipment for years. Last thing i bought was a new camera to shoot my RU-vid videos with and everyone bitches about the microphone.
Surprisingly, some excellent early CD players came out of the Philips factory in Belgium! Among them the cheap-looking Marantz CD56 I bought in 1984 that's never needed a service, still sounds glorious and effortlessly makes sense of disc errors that trip up more modern CD players.
