My trusty old Technics cd player is on the fritz – put a cd in and it comes up with a no disc message. Is it dead or something mendable.

Worth giving the innards a clean.

Crack it open and give the laser lens a clean with something that won’t leave a residue. Also check the transport rails aren’t covered in muck.

If it’s tray loading, whip the top off, and carefully clean the lens with a cotton bud and isopropanol, if you have some, or possibly vodka. You get a build-up of very fine dust because of static, until the laser can no longer read the pits on the disc.
Check the disc, too, it might be mucky fingerprints on the disc surface in the centre, the player reads the disc menu around the centre hole, then reads outward from the centre.

There are a number of possible causes. Did it stop reading discs overnight or was it struggling for a long time? Can you hear the disc spinning up inside the player?

Some major fault sources:

Internal cable assy come loose or intermittent.

Dirty lens on the mech – either get one of those cleaning discs or take cover off player and then mech, see if you can clean the lens with isoprop or similar. You could also try and blow dust away from the inside of the player.

Faulty mech – you might find a like for like replacement on ebay, but they could possibly be running different S/W or H/W from standard.

Dry joints on the decoder/servo control IC, if handy with an iron you could touch these up.

Past these obvious ones, you’d be looking at PSU rails then fault finding to component level.

Took the top off and cleaned the lense, still no joy. the disc starts to spin up if you hit the play button but then fades out as the no disc message comes up.

Its a Technics sl pg 580a which was ok in its day but you can pick them up on ebay for £30.00 now.

Classic sign that the transport mechanism is knackered. Beyond economical repair i’m afraid. Happened to a Marantz unit I had a while back.

Did a bit of googling, the mech is CDM12.1 also known as VAM1202. Would you be comfortable swapping the mech out? If so I can have a look at work to see if I could find one for you.

This warms my heart in these days of planned obsolescence. Mend it!

To be fair, his CD player is probably about 20 years old so has had a decent innings

Happy to have a go as quite attached to it – bought the amp and tape dec at the same time. Is that a unplug and unscrew job or soldering irons job?

Yeah but you wouldn’t junk it if it was a pair of ESL 57’s would ya?

It’s still probably better than the majority of DVD players that people listen to music with.

The mech itself is connected via a ribbon cable, no soldering for that bit. The motor might be hard wired, I’ll have a look if I can locate one. The bit I don’t have any experience of is the mounting in the plastic tray, should be fairly simple though. Advice would be to take a few pics as you disassemble. And don’t leave it plugged into the mains 😉

Ta.

JCL, I am probably not the benchmark when it comes to throwing away old hi fi! Thing is, for most people it probably is easier just to bin it. I agree that there is considerable joy to be had from fixing stuff that is broken.

More googling refreshes my memory, that the sled motor and spindle motor are both hard wired. I would guess that these are loomed together on your mech, so you would have to desolder them and use the cable on the mech I’ll send you if I can find one.

Laser failures are common – you may be able to get one if you can find
the model number -most replacements will need at least a pair of links desoldering – they are linked for static protection and you should use
a static protected iron if you can.
Yours is old so you may not be able to get a fresh one.
I recently replaced an expensive Arcam player with the correct generic Hitachi laser/transport – £15 well worth 20 minutes work.

OK, located a suitable transport. Email in profile Nipper 🙂

RichPenny – Member

OK, located a suitable transport. Email in profile Nipper

^^^ this is STW at its best.

Thanks Rich, mail sent.

Good man RichPenny.

RichPenny – Member
OK, located a suitable transport. Email in profile Nipper

Very kind.

Anything else laying around at work you don’t need Rich? A spare power amp or two would be very handy. 😀

Rich as good as his word, i will post some pics as i go along with the fix.

After putting this job off wet Sunday and a broken hand seemed like a good opportunity to give this a go, not sure about the broken hand but i would have been out on the bike otherwise.

All came apart easily enough, plenty of photos to record what went where, lots of burnt fingers (trying to solder with said broken hand)and some foul oaths and then all back together. Swithched on and away she went first time:

A couple of pics below – thanks again Rich 🙂

CD Repair 001 by jamesanderson2010, on Flickr

CD Repair 003 by jamesanderson2010, on Flickr

CD Repair 006 by jamesanderson2010, on Flickr

CD Repair 007 by jamesanderson2010, on Flickr

well done, have to say my first thoughts when seeing this a few months ago was just chuck it and get a new one as it’ll be uneconomical to repair

(and this is from someone who does some diyhifi electronics!)

Well done! Really good to see a well loved machine brought back to life.