I have had this cd player for about 20 years. Back in the late 90s the speaker company I worked for received back a load of pairs of speakers that had been out for review at either Haymarket Publishing or HiFi Choice. In amongst the boxes returned was this CD player which went unnoticed and sat in a store room for 6-7 years until the factory closed. There was an auction of stuff and I picked it up but it never worked satisfactorily, wouldn’t read a lot of discs especially CDRs & it sat for many years like a weighty boat anchor gathering dust.
More recently I had a look inside and concluded that the laser assembly was knackered and as it was the spendy, rare & unfixable Sony KSS-151 I thought that might be that. However someone here (Darren) said that an engineer called Mike Pickwell up in Sheffield might be able to resuscitate it. I sent it, he replaced a lot of old caps on the Servo board, fitted new belts to the loader mech and returned it. It did play now but there were still a good number of discs it couldn’t load up. Then I noticed various eBay sellers were offering KSS-151 replacements out of China so I ordered one, it came & I sent it all back up to Mike. Meanwhile I noticed a German after market ‘tuner’ offering a pair of modules to update the Sample Rate Converter and the Digital Filter with newer chips so I ordered those and also sent them to Mike.
Now it’s back and working nicely, not only that, it’s unusual in that it has Digital Inputs so you can attach an external digital source and just run the DAC part of it. At the moment it’s playing off the output of a Chromecast Audio and sounds decent doing that. I’m glad I resurrected it. It’s a beast of a thing (16 Kg). They don’t really make CD players like this any more.
A recommendation for Mike Pickwell too who knows his stuff and can work on such electronics.
Good to see that bought back to life - until the Chinese started producing drives you couldn’t give VRDS-mech’d CDPs and CDTs away, which is a shame as they were very well engineered and make great transports.
‘Mike P’ is a regular on Fink Pish - very helpful and knowledgeable, a sort of anti-Arkless
He’s just a colossal cunt who blames the world for his inability to sell anything. Is in denial that getting shit faced and insulting customers, wishing that peoples children would die of cancer is the real reason people won’t go near him.
My PV1 subwoofer seems to only stay on a few seconds.
Driving me mad. Not sure it’s the home receiver, so it’s probably a set service fee to send it back. Unless I risk opening it and looking for anything obvious.
I can’t take watching stuff with no bass!! I’m far too used to 5.1.
So, I get that the keener eyed amongst you cunts may have figured out that this isn’t really “hi-fi” as such, but it’s here 'cos …
a; it’s valves,… and
b; it does have an air of “Heco-Deco” about it that I quite enjoy!..
I had a 25 but the laser mechanism failed and I sent it to a repairer who explained it was impossible…I left it with them to get rid of/use as they saw fit…
but it’s here 'cos …
