Need some help/advice with a home CD player

[MichaelD]

Hello everyone,

I hope your weekend was a good one. Mine was pretty good. I've been meaning to post this for some time, but I'm finally peeved enough to get around to it. LOL!

My home CD player is a Kenwood 1050CD. Five-disc turntable-style CD changer. It's about five years old. For about the past year, it skips on CDs. It used to be that it would only skip on "scratched or dirty" CDs; wiping the CD would fix the skip, no prob. For about the past 6 months, it skips with most CDs, no matter which "slot" they are in. Again, it's a turntable style CD player, not a cartridge-load type.

I purchased a CD lens cleaning CD. It's a CD, with a little brush mounted underneath. It helped a little at first, now it has no effect.

When it skips, it skips so badly that you have to forward to the next track manually; it will not correct itself. I'm no technician, but to me it seems that the slighest little irregularity in the surface of the CD will screw it up. I have some CDs that are 5-6 years old, with no visual blemishes or defects, yet it skips. I have some newer CDs that won't skip.

To me, it sound like a "laser alignment" problem. The CD player has never been dropped, hit or jarred. It's just been used and used and used some more.

Is it worth taking to a shop to have it fixed? Is it something I can do myself? Thanks for any advice or assistance you can provide. Have a great Sunday evening.

 

[Theslowone]

If it skips on new cds then yes that sounds like the lasers out of wack(the technical term), how about the surface that the cds sit on, is it clean and dust free. But in general if this is the problem then you will probably need to take it to get fixed. What you might run into getting it fixed somewhere else is it might cost more than what you have in it. A new motor for those things cost about 30 bucks, and you add about 25-50 bucks labor and thats one nice repair bill.

A new dvd player is retailed for 250 so watch out paying to much.

 

[Eug]

Time for retirement. Buy a new Kenwood 5-disc changer for $120 instead of paying $75 to get it fixed. (Kenwood CD-404 - has coaxial digital audio output). You can even get ones for underUS$100 if you don't need the digital audio output.

Or else upgrade to DVD. A good quality single disc player is around $180 it will play DVD, CD, VCD, CD-R, MP3. (Panasonic RV31)

 

[MichaelD]

Thanks guys. I have a DVD player already, and I like to have my CD changer...helps during those "special moments" to not have to load up some more tunes. I will check into that CD-404, Eug; I like Kenwood products. Plus, if I stay all-Kenwood, I can keep that I-link thing that makes the receiver automatically switch inputs to the CD input when I load up a CD. The old one is on the way out the door. Thanks again.

 

[Viperoni]

You might wanna consider a DVD changer...I've been kinda wanting one so my lazy arse doesn't have to walk 5 feet to my setup and change DVD's/cds