Customer reported that this player started skipping on CDs and brought it in for a service. At first the fault didn’t show up, having played through a CD twice through. After checking with the owner, they said tried over several days and still had issues.
One other small issue was that the Eject/Load tactile button switch had lost its tactile click, which was fairly annoying as never really sure if it was pressed or not, and given a small delay before action, could lead to pressing twice and cancelling out!
The pickup lens and the optical path were cleaned, and even though the grease looked ok, cleaned and re-greased the sled sliders, found a small bit of black material on one, but didn’t really think this was the issue. It seemed to be playing CDs and DVDs fine.
Came back to it the next day and about half way through a CD it glitched out and stopped playing, refusing to restart without eject/reload or power off/on. I think the laser pickup is probably a bit marginal, and potentially confusing the decoding/servo control circuitry, so ordered a replacement.
Pickup arrived, and after taking the necessary static precautions, swapped it over (for the uninitiated, this type of pickup has two laser diodes, each protected for transit by a small shorting solder blob which can be both seen on the flex pcb).
After installation and removal of the two shorting solder blobs, tested a range of CDs including CDRWs and was playing without error for 6-7 hours over a couple of days or so!
The ‘squishy’ eject button was replaced. CLICK! That’s better!
Then found the cooling fan was a bit noisy (low rumble/growl), so the PSU board was removed to get access. The fan was quite dirty too.
After cleaning:
The tray front panel also didn’t close quite flush with the main front panel which I thought was a bit annoying as it protruded slightly at the left. It didn’t seem possible to loosen mounting posts and perform slight alignment adjustment.
On further inspection, where the mechanism was mounted at the bottom of the case, two of the mounting places were located at some ventilation slots. It appeared that even at the factory they must have had to slightly file away some material to get the required position, however it still wasn’t quite right.
After making a couple of screw ‘slots’ slightly larger with a fine needle file, the front panel looked a lot smoother, equal gaps around the tray opening, and was returned to the customer after another CD or two playing fine.