CED VideoDisc and Player Discussion

[Fred Garvin]

I am a new CED player (SKT-400) owner, and I've been having great fun with it over the last couple of months (replacing the drive belt was fun; cleaning up the remains of the old belt, not so much). Anyway, I come from years of LD experience, so I'm very familiar with playback flaws inherent to that format (laser rot, dropouts, speckles, etc.). However, I'm trying to determine if the playback flaws I'm seeing with CED are simply inherent to the contact-based format or if there's something wrong with my player / software. I don't have access to another player, so I have no real point of reference to know if, say, I need a new stylus or something. I'm observing flaws such as:

1. Speckling -- not unlike mild laser rot on LDs and visible mainly on black backgrounds. Seems to happen on the same discs and is mainly noticable during the opening fanfares. Some discs are clear of this effect.

2. Horizontal "tearing" of the picture extending all the way from the left to the right edge of the frame -- comes and goes but may last for minutes at a time. Seems to occur at the same places on the disc.

3. Picture and sound breaking up into "snow" for a second -- this does not seem to be reproducable; I can encounter the glitch, reverse the disc, and the same portion will play fine the second time but it may occur again a few seconds later at a different point.

I'm also planning to record a number of the rarer CED programs I encounter to DVD or media files. The FAQ mentions some ways to "prep" older discs that may not have been played for years or decades. Can anyone share their "processes" they employ before recording a CED to ensure the most glitch-free playback for posterity? I probably won't have the patience to note the location of every glitch and hit the repeat play to fix each and every one, but I could let the disc play several times unattended before recording.

Thanks in advance for the feedback!

[RT9342]

I've had CEDs in my home for about 25 years and have also owned laserdiscs and various players for about 10 years, so I think I may be able to help you.

I think the speckling you see right at the beginning of the disc is simply fine scratches that occur along the rim of the disc (kind of like the loud crackling you sometimes hear on a record when you first drop the stylus at the lead-in). I haven't figured out the exact cause of the continuous speckles, but I have noticed in my experience that it varies from player to player. I'm kind of surprised that you're seeing it on a 400 series player, because it's usually the 100 series player that I've seen it to be a real problem. It could be dust on the disc or even stylus wear. If the ending credits look blurry and kind of psychedelic, that's a better sign that you have stylus problems.

The horizontal "tearing" is most likely scratches on the disc. The data is 4 times denser on CEDs, compared to standard play (CAV) laserdiscs. As a result, a scratch covers a larger area of the video, usually an entire scan line, or multiple scan lines if it's an angled scratch - this will surely cause the "tearing" appearance, and I've seen it quite often on scratched discs.

The nasty audio & video break-up is almost always caused by a dustball, fingerprint, or other contaminate on the disc that throws off the capacitance so bad that the tonearm can't get a good signal. Since it's usually something that's literally picked up by the stylus tip, it can get moved out of the way, which is why this glitch won't always occur in the same place, but may pop up somewhere afterwards.

I think that model has a stylus sweep option (I think pause can activate it) - I recommend cleaning the stylus often on discs that you haven't played in a while.

Hope that helps.

[Glenn]

"The nasty audio & video break-up is almost always caused by a dustball, fingerprint, or other contaminate on the disc.
I think that model has a stylus sweep option (I think pause can activate it) - I recommend cleaning the stylus often on discs that you haven't played in a while." This pretty well sums it up. Often I have to run the stylus sweep several times before it clears and I also have a 400 player I purchased new.

[Jesse Skeen]

The 'speckling' is a more common problem near the middle of the disc, roughly between the 15-25 minute marks. This is usually caused by stacking too many things on top of a disc so that the caddy touches the disc inside. When I check discs for condition but don't have time to watch them all the way though, I usually check a few seconds at 15, 20, and 25 minutes into each side since it will usually look its worst at those points.

Discs that don't have this problem but do skip a lot might be doing so just because they haven't been played in a while. I've gotten some sealed discs where on first play they would skip in some parts but would play fine after that; usually the stylus needs to 'clear a path' first then it'll be fine. Some minor skips can also be gotten rid of or at least reduced by reverse-scanning and playing it repeatedly.
_________________
Videodisc and stereo sound- there's no better value around!