Worth fixing?


I have a Rotel 951 CD player paired with an Arcam alpha7 amp and Paradigm speakers. One speaker cuts in and out occasionally. (Which doesn’t happen with the turntable). Swapped it with an Onkyo CD player and problem solved so it’s clearly the CD player issue.  But it has some sentimental value. Ideas about what the problem might be and is it fixable by me.  Or should I junk it. 

qialah

@jwei. I invested $80 for a repair shop to fix my Pro-Ject P1.2 turntable which it turned out needed a motor no longer made. Won’t make that mistake again. 
 

@waytoomuchstuff.  I did clean the contacts and checked the cables,  I’m definitely not $300 worth of sentimental. 
 

Off to the recycle bin it goes.   Thanks everyone. 

hmmmm.... if the unit does something or does something in a way that no more modern unit quite does, i’d move heaven and earth [within affordability or availability of fundage] to fix it. case in point, i have an old DBX CD player, unfortunately parts are not available to fix it, but it did something NO OTHER cd player before or since would do, it had a dynamic range adjustment [expand or compress], a stereo image adjustment [ditto] and an impact adjustment [made musical leading edges sharper], those were very handy features, sometimes i had to listen to music when people were close by and i didn’t want to disturb them at night, so i’d dial back the dynamic range. on some old Elvis CDs the PTB decided to record them in very narrow stereo, so i’d use the stereo width adjustment to fix that.

i also have an old Koss ambience enhancement box that when it worked back in the day, it gave me a pretty fair [for primitive digital] approximation of a virtual room behind my listening position. cool. same thing though, no parts available to fix it. a pity. but if there were parts i’d go into hock restoring them to playability. so if you like your old Rotel CD player for similar reasons, go for it.

@vinylvin I agree. Try cleaning, swapping. 
 

@qialah 

 

Did you swap interconnects to see if the problem swapped channels?

 

Did you use the same interconnects with the replacement player? 

 

I sold a guy an integrated and tested it with/for him. He called when he made it home and said one channel stopped working. I told him to do some testing (swap cables) and return for a refund if he couldn’t figure it out. It was the cables. 
 

Good luck, let us know…

You should just get a newer Rotel RCD-1572MKII, you can find them for around $1,200.00 or try to find a new older RCD-1572 I have 2 of them and I paid around $700.00 for each, just take your time and you can find some deals on demo models from many different brands.

Wish it well, and replace it with an Audiolab 6000CDT…..great unit, but transport only…..you didn’t mention if you had a DAC