Rotel RCD-1070 replacement

Peterman1983, if you have no experience doing a laser swap, I regret that my post above may have encouraged you to try it yourself. I have had two laser replacements done by factory authorized techs. The first one was done badly and the new laser lasted a year at best. The second one was done well and AFAIK the player is still going strong. I conclude that the job is not as easy as it may seem, and I would not try it myself unless I were willing either to scrap the machine afterwards or to pay someone to clean up my mess.

That's all very well in hindsight, of course :(. It seems to me you now have a few options, if nobody here chimes in with a solution. You can look for a good technician willing to take over, you can try the ribbon cable replacement Rudd suggests above, or you can give up and see what a non-working player is worth to you or someone else.

Please let us know how things go if you get the chance.

perterman, per my post above try changing the ribbon (approx 2 dollars). When I changed the Lazer on its own the CD player struggled to spin up and could not read the CD's, once I changed the ribbon (Lazer to system board ribbon) the unit worked fine. At this point you have nothing to loose. My unit was well out of warranty when I called Rotel for support and they sent me one for free.

Perterman, I forgot to mention that the lazer is delievered with a with a bit of solder applied,therefore, the lazer assembly is disabled by default. You will need a soldering gun to remove the tac thus re-enabling the lazer. If you not sure how to do this be read to instruction or google the process as there are several good instuction out there onthe net. Its a pain in the butt, and I think the reason for the solder is to prevent damage during transit.

Hmm, I think I'll try to contact Rotel for the ribbon cable, and do some research on the solder job. I've got plenty of experience with a soldering iron, so I think it's worth trying. At this point, I've picked up a budget replacement, which I'm actually quite happy with, for the money. So at least I can keep listening to my music, and take my time working on the Rotel :)

Thanks a ton for your input

Good news! I found the solder jumper and removed it this evening. Put things back together and I'm once again listening to music from my Rotel as we speak! I even picked one of my scratched up discs and it seems to be happy so far. It's too soon to call it a success, but things are looking good so far! I will probably still put the new ribbon cable in there when that comes too, since I've had the original one out a couple times.

Since I did pick up a budget replacement which will also so SACD and DVD-A, I'm interested in doing a more critical comparison between the two, now that this one is working again.

Thanks again for the tips, I would have probably given up on the broken Rotel without your suggestions.