Yesterday's ebay bargain...

[ffutures]

...was a laserdisc player for £16. I did have to go to the arse end of nowhere (e.g. Northamptonshire) to collect it, which added another £28, but that's still a LOT cheaper than anything else I've seen on ebay recently. And it's an adequate though somewhat limited machine - single-sided play, and can't handle really old disks with analogue sound tracks, but apart from that it's OK, plays PAL and NTSC, and works well.

The reason why I needed another was that my old laserdisc player which has a fairly good specification (2-sides, PAL/NTSC, analogue/digital sound) has decided to be VERY awkward about loading disks - it'll only do it if I put the disk in the drawer, switch off, let it power down, then switch on, let it go through its startup routine, then press play. Even then it's got very picky about which disks it'll play. My guess is that it's out of alignment and/or needs a thorough clean. I can open the casing and vacuum, but beyond that I'm at a bit of a loss, and Pioneer pointed me at a service company that quotes £60+VAT for a no-warranty repair, which means it really isn't going to happen any time soon.

The "new" machine will tide me over while I try to find a cheaper solution for the other one. Somewhere there has to be a "Laserdisc player repair for dummies" site, I just need to find it. And if all else fails I can sell the old one in "as is" condition and probably get more for it than I paid for the replacement.

Comments

[nojay.livejournal.com]

Worst case let me know, I've got a Pioneer LD player sitting somewhat unloved on the shelf. It wasn't plugged in during the Great Voltalypse a few weeks ago so it's OK as far as I can tell. Model no. CLD-110KVT, single-side only but NTSC/PAL, both speeds, does karaoke as well. The only use I've got for it nowadays is ripping laserdiscs and I've not bought any in the past couple of years as they're getting difficult to find even in places like Akihabara in Tokyo. A lot of the stuff I'm interested in is available on DVD in higher quality now anyway.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

That's incredibly kind of you, but does it actually do analogue sound? The description (http://www.laserdiscarchive.co.uk/laserdisc_archive/pioneer/pioneer_cld-110kvt/CLD-110KVT.htm) of it doesn't say.

I think the first step is to clean the bugger and see if that helps. Probably tomorrow, I'm too knackered tonight.

[nojay.livejournal.com]

If by analogue sound you mean it has RCA stereo out then yes. I don't think it has home theatre connection like RDS, not sure though as I've not looked at its back for a while. I might have the manual for it somewhere, I'll take a look later.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Roughly how many laserdiscs do you have?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

No, what I'm talking about is the sound track on the disk. Early laserdiscs had audio tracks in an uncompressedd format, like the audio track on a VCR but optical rather than magnetic (can't really explain it better than that). That was replaced by digital tracks more like a CD. Eventually support for the analogue tracks was dropped from some players on the assumption that there would be new users who wouldn't buy old disks. This appears to be a player built to that assumption.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

110-120 ish.