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I'm looking at buying a good CD player for my personal use and I was wondering what make/model would you recommend. You clearly know the models a lot better than I do and you've been working/fixing them so you've seen a lot more than I did. I was looking at the Sony X77esd but other suggestions are welcomed.
Thanks!
If you’re into old stuff, the Denon DCD-3560, with 4 PCM-58K, was some kind of a beast. Yamaha did also interesting players.
But the Sony you mention has an interesting filter, the CXD1244, which I think features the same staggered mode as CXD1144 of the 227-ESD reviewed here, and with a noise shaper on top. I never had a look at the SM to check the implementation but I guess @restorer-john did
Hopefully just the usual dead/dying focus/tracking servo IC. This one has original 1983 Sony hybrid thick films in it.
Already dug out my bag of LA6510s. LOL. Somebody had made/was selling a nice little PCB a few years back- anybody seen it recently? Wouldn't mind grabbing a bunch.
Bomb proof transport:
Murata active LPFs (in the cans) and D/A. And a little bit of Sony bond glue corrosion...
Looks like a zener. Thing with bond glue corrosion and zeners is it changes their characteristics. I've had zeners shift their voltage, turn into resistors and worse. So that will need to be repaired as a precaution.
I've found the PCB gerbers and ordered some PCBs for the LA6510 boards. So, I'll wait until they arrive as I'll do the replacement in any case. Got plenty of spares for the box of 4x CDP-101s in the storeroom too.
Bram Jacobse has publicly listed the file. (scroll to the bottom)
Added LA6510 2 x 100nf SMD 1206 4 x 2r2 Resitors SMD 1206 Just thought I’d drop you an email to say thankyou again Using the diagrams and links I was able to...
I've never opened one up, but I am curious. Not curious enough to wreck a CDP-101 though. Figured it was opamp based with the +/-12V supply, but who knows. Murata were always famous for their 10.7MHz often ganged ceramic filters in FM tuners, so I guess they were the logical company to approach back in the day.
I have a 227 ESD bought in around 1989 ish. Its nice to see some measurements for it after all this time. I have had a peak inside and mine has dual TDA-1541.
I can't say I was ever particularly excited by it, but it served its purpose well enough and still works to this day, which is something I guess, but then so does my budget Philips CD 150.
Seems CD players have had an easy life in my household.
They were also built to last. The service manuals are a good indication for this. In the first generations, service technicians got thorough instructions how to swap lasers and align them mechanically and electronically.
The force with which the disc is pressed onto the platter is also generated by a leaf spring and not by a magnet, as in all subsequent designs.
I wonder if they were very careful 42 years ago and thought that a magnet might interfere with the control of the laser lens, which is also magnetically driven.
I myself have a Sony DVP-S9000ES. Unfortunately, its drive cannot read CD-R, thus NTTY's test CD cannot be used to measure it. I have found that track #28 of the Denon Audio Technical CD produces about the same results as NTTY's test CD with other disc players that are able to read CD-R when they are measured with a good analogue distortion analyzer (Boonton 1130). I can report that the THD+N at about 1 kHz @ 0 dBFS with the Denon test disc is 0.0025% (-92.04 dB SINAD) over a 30 kHz bandwidth. I think that restricting a THD+N (or SINAD) measurement to the audio bandwidth (20 Hz - 20 kHz) would produce a better result, as I very much suspect that a great deal of the unwanted spuriae produced by the Sony are out of band noise rather than in-band noise or distortion.
The low distortion level in CD mode is impressive. Less so in SA-CD mode. But the FFT graphs have revealed some power-supply related low-frequency tones and some other spuriae in both mode (more in SA-CD than CD mode), albeit at low to very low levels. All in all, the Germans have published an A-weighted signal to noise ratio of 106 dB in CD mode and 108.5 dB in SA-CD mode. Frequency response in both CD and SA-CD mode is almost ruler flat in the audio band.
I was able to spot a set of professionally made DVDs and DVD-As with test signals in 24 bits and higher sample rates than 44.1 kHz. I will give them a try with the DVP-S9000ES as soon as possible...
EDIT : I should add that track #28 of the Denon test disc does produced an output voltage 0.38 dB lower than the undithered 999.91 Hz @ 0 dBFS test tone of NTTY's test CD at the 100k ohms input of the distortion analyzer.
www.bramjacobse.nl
