Educate me please

You people never seem to learn. How many times do people offer so-called mid-fi and lo-fi stuff for sell, saying they only used it for a few months while their mega buck 'reference' piece was being repaired. The high price has NOTHING to do with reliabilty and in many cases performance either. I put my $299 NAD in the garage because I got tired of looking at it, after 10 years of perfect service. I thought the mega-priced stuff was expensive due to 'high grade' parts being used??? You should certainly call your guru and give him an ear full.

Mambir my good old friend .. I miss our thought provoking exchanges from the earlier part of the century ... good to see you active in the forum again

I must imagine by now those boys of yours have grown at bit and no longer want to be fire and police men and have turned their attention to chasing lovely bipedal females ... this most likely has turned your jet black hair to a wonderful salt and pepper shade

I have some advice ... “Just For Men” .. there is no status in over paying at the Salon

I sincerely hope saki70 took my comments in a lite hearted and humorous way as I meant no sarcasm or condescending ... only trying to help with the skipping problem ... but he did ask for a education .. so I took him to school

I hope my post enables saki70 to rescue his expensive machines with a minium cost and effort and why I suggested not telling tech it was skipping but wanted tune up similar to an oil change and tire rotation on his car

saki70 ... you must have skipped class the day we discussed the 3 most common failures a CD player can experience

ha, ha, ha, ha!! LOL, indeed! I see, Dave, that you are back (from the Depths of Mordor).
BTW, I still have those ESP Essence power cords I bought from you & I remember your sarcastic but good natured sense of humour! ;-)

Good question, I also had to replace the transport in a 5K unit while my $189 Oppo plays on without a glitch. Fortunately, in many players, replacing the entire transport is pretty cheap and easy. I did it myself and I'm no tech.

saki70 ... you must have skipped class the day we discussed the 3 most common failures a CD player can experience

The first is Spindle Motor failure ... when the motor gets tired and slows down or stops/expires .. the laser can no longer lock on to or read the TOC (data stream) and will display a ... “NO DISC” or “ERROR” message in the display

The second is when the capacitor in the laser power supply gets weak or fails the power supply isn’t energized and again the laser can’t read the TOC and throws a “NO DISC” or “ERROR” message in the display

The third and most likely your problem is when the factory lubricant on the rails that the laser sled rides on dries up from years of use ... it creates hard spots ... lumps of dried up lubricant

When the laser hits one of these dry spots it stalls momentarily and loses lock with the TOC ... once the laser drives past the dried lube it regains lock with the TOC and plays normally until it hits another dry patch

The fix is easy ... just clean the rails that the laser rides on of the dried factory Lube. and reapply the some lube

If you don’t want to attempt this yourself take it to a reputable repair or service center and ask them to clean the laser and re-lube the rails .... if you tell them the player is skipping ... they will want to replace the whole transports assembly to CTA and they make more money installing complete assemblies vs cleaning and lubing players

You do not need a factory trained tech or send it back to the factory ... just a reputable local electronics repair shop should be able to handle it

Not sure if you can post links to retailer so if you or anyone else reading this contacts me at ... davehrab(AT)charter(DOT)net I can give you a link to a very good synthetic lube used for this purpose

Soon the Student will be the Teacher

Dump it. Buy an oppo 95. It is not cost effective to hunt for the defect, if you could find a competent tech, which is highly unlikely. If you find one, Elizabeth's idea of a quick global replacement of the caps is a great idea, assuming you have the schematic with the parts list.