I appreciate your passion, and I have not given up (yet). I still own another CD player so I have a backup solution. On the other hand, "ianrmack""is right: The unit is 20+ years old...
Unfortunately, the unit is very difficult to service as the PCB is multilayer, so any soldering effort is easily compromised. My experience with ML when it comes to service is not good, as also expressed in this forum several times. I can appreciate that ML tries to protect their service agents, but they should make service manuals available for old models (they used to do this but stopped when - I believe - Harman International acquired them). This and the associated cost if you need to go to a service agent are definitely reasons for me not to purchase any new ML anymore.
I'll keep you posted on my progress.