CED VideoDisc and Player Discussion

DiscoKat · Joined: 10 Jul 2008 Posts: 11

Have a few questions as I've just gotten myself into CED's.

My player (SJT-200) has a couple of interesting quirks, one of which is what I call "speckling" where, like a Laserdisc, you get random dots of red, green or blue very lightly showing on the screen. It seems to affect all my discs.

What would be the cause of this? Is there a remedy?

Secondly, I get some random lines showing up. They are more like heavy concentrations of speckling and sometimes they will start at the bottom of the screen and crawl up. Some will start midway and crawl up. They usually are accompanied by soft audio "tics".

Mostly, these appear right before a healthy skip, but others appear without skipping.

I have ordered a new stylus for my player regardless as I do not know how long the stylus inside has been used. I have also adjusted platter height as cedatum.net suggests.

Is there anything else I can try?

7jlong · Joined: 01 Jun 2004 Posts: 187

I don't know what causes this or if it is fixable, but I have seen it in all the players I have dealt with to a certain degree.

I know that's not very helpful, but just so you know: it's not unusual. New needles didn't seem to change much, though my best player shows less of it than the others.

I've often wondered if this is dusty circuits or something, like when you pick up an old receiver, the volume potentiometer is full of dust, and your speakers explode with crackle from the slightest volume adjustment...

Jesse Skeen · Joined: 28 May 2004 Posts: 539 Location: Sacramento, CA

The speckling is a problem with the disc, not the player. The center part of the disc, roughly from the 15-35 minute marks, gets damaged more easily than the beginning or end- usually scratches from too many things stacked on top of it, or I've heard sometimes dust will settle then get melted into the disc, if that makes any sense.

I've had lots of discs start out perfect then get really bad towards the middle then clear up at least somewhat by the end- I have a player set up just for checking the condition of discs where I skip to 15, 20, 25 and 30 minutes and check the playback quality- if it's good there then most likely the whole disc is in good shape, but if it's noisy then I need to find another copy in better condition.
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7jlong · Joined: 01 Jun 2004 Posts: 187

RT9342 · Joined: 29 Nov 2006 Posts: 224 Location: San Antonio, TX

I've noticed that too...only I thought it was only the old chassis (SFT, SGT) that had the speckling problem, as my SJT's that I once had (before parting them out to other members of this forum) wouldn't speckle like that. It seems that it was more noticeable when I lived closer to an airport, and I've heard that the airport control towers can cause some kind of interference with older players, which is why the PIC board was added to the SGT models (and the circuitry used on that board incorporated into the main board on the later models). But maybe that's not it??? Anyone tried a "speckling" player at a different location, like a friend or relative's house?