CED VideoDisc and Player Discussion

[RT9342]

I got a problem with my Zenith VP2000 player (identical to the SFT-100 once you remove the plastic casing) and was wondering if anyone might have some insight. The audio pops and crackles LOUDLY, especially when playing dirty or scratched discs. I know that popping and crackling is normal with this format, but it's unusually bad with my player. Now, I've had the sound cut out completely and noticed that tapping or rotating the trimmer cap near the AUDIO OUT pin brings the sound back in. This cap appears to be damaged, and only works in a certain position, so I'm wondering if the cap would be the culprit. Anyone familiar with this? I noticed that the noise in the MONO OUT pathway is the same level while the audio signal is much louder, thus producing a cleaner sound. But it's still kind of noisy, and that pathway is not muted when doing visual search, or when the FM signal is weak. If I needed to replace the trimmer cap, does anyone know the capacitance range of this cap, and perhaps the ideal capacitance setting? Could it also be the IC next to the cap? I hate to have to throw out this player - it's in otherwise great condition and almost NEVER skips - even when the disc has dirty spots where the signal completely drops out - I've never seen a CED player with such stable tracking.

[jmetal88]

I hope nobody minds me digging up such an old thread with my first post. I have an SFT100 with the exact same problem mentioned here (very stable video, but audio crackling so loudly it's almost unbearable) and I was wondering if anyone came up with a solution for this at all. I can't find any other mentions of this problem, at least at the moment. If anyone can point me in the right direction for figuring this out, I'd really appreciate it.

[jmetal88]

On second thought, I might just have a really dirty stack of discs. They all do this to some extent, but at least one of them is barely noticeable in spots. I purchased all my discs and my player in one lot from a thrift store, and they seem to have come from the house of a heavy smoker, so that might have something to do with it.

EDIT: Well, on third thought, I don't think they're dirty, I think they're scratched. It looks like the bad ones have been scraping against the caddies on insertion and removal, creating a nice ring of scratches around the center of the discs. Maybe I just ought to look into getting replacement discs for the movies in the collection that I actually want to watch.