I’ve got an early-‘90’s-era Laserdisc player, manufactured by Denon. I’ve got about 100 Laserdiscs, movies, concerts, etc. The doggone thing broke about four years ago, and I am unable to find a company that’ll fix it. Anybody know a place that’ll repair the blame thing? I have thought about buying a used one via e-bay, but this Denon was top o’ the line circa 1993. Any ideas?
Do you have any idea what’s wrong with it?
My laserdisc player broke a couple of years ago (it wouldn’t recognize any disc). I traced it down to the laser head assembly. It wasn’t too difficult to replace, but it did cost $80 for the assembly.
If you’re mechanically inclined, try to find the repair manual. Does Denon have a website? If not, try to find local shops that may have fixed them at one time, you might get lucky. Otherwise, check out pawn shops. I used to work at one and still frequent them looking for bargains. I could probably put my hands on 2-3 right now (though, not likely Denon).
Ebay has dozens of lightly used, near new laserdisc players for inexpensive prices that people are trying to unload because they have moved to DVDs. Might make more sense to get one of these vs repairing your current unit.
Thanks for the suggestions, y’all.
90% of the time it’s mechanical trouble, and not all that hard to fix if you are reasonably dextrous. I used to fix these things all the time, but somewhere around the turn of the century a lot of manufacturers discontinued the parts (although you can still find them in stock everywhere), so my company adopted an official do-not-service policy.
I’m amazed that Crafter Man’s optical ass’y replacement went without a hitch; a new laser usually needs basic alignments, at least for the defraction grating.
Give it to a hobbyist; it may be something fairly simple.
I just ordered a new laser assembly and installed it. It was a little difficult to remove the old assembly, since it rode on a roller-coaster track (for reading both sides of the disk), but I eventually figured out how to do it.
I’m don’t see why you’d have to make any alignment adjustments, since laser movement is servo-controlled.
The servos control the lens’s focus (Z) & fine tracking (Y). I’m speaking of the mechanical positioning of the whole assembly on the (X) axis so that the XY plane that the laser lives in is perfectly parallel to the plane of the spinning disc. Hard to explain in text, but think of a telescope on a tripod. The servos maintain the position of the scope, while the mechanical alignments make sure that the initial setup is perfect (three legs of the tripod are the same length, the ground is perfectly level, etc).
Now that I think back, it was really only Pioneer that required a lot of fine tuning. Sony & MaggotBox were pretty much trouble free.
O.K., I think I see what you’re saying… the laser beam must be normal to the plane the disk is in. If the laser beam is not normal to the disk, the return beam will not hit the detector. This cannot be corrected by focus or fine tracking adjustments.
Hmmm. Perhaps it is due to precision manufacturing of the head assemblies? Not sure. But it did work…