I recently resurrected my two old Techincs CD players, an SL-XP1 and an SL-XP350. I have cleaned them thoroughly, lubed the laser pick-up movements and checked for any damage. They appear to work fine but my doubt is, do those cd players suffer from capacitor failures ? Both have many electrolytic capacitors which on walkman's tend to fail after 25~30 years. Is tat the case also for portable CD players ? thanks
I have seen it on some CDPs, yes. Low volume and high distortion, muffled sound. I didn't recap them to confirm as they aren't usually worth it (lots and lots of caps). If it sounds good I'd leave it alone.
I used to search far and wide for a Technics Portable CD Player, just to have a cool old one. They seemed to be pretty rare even with a plethora of other players filling the thrift's shelves. I finally found one that was more of the egg shape design and wasn't into the quality of construction and actually left it on the shelf. I'd love to find a first generation square model but I don't look as much as I used to and a lot of thrift stores don't carry as many electronics anymore. There's some threads on AK about this, hope this helps. http://audiokarma.org/forums/index.php?threads/is-it-worth-recapping-a-cd-player.394288/
Thanks for the info; no capacitor looks damaged, leaky or bulged, I will leave them as they are. The two technics I have are somehow square and old, but not that old; they both belong to the early 90's when portable CD player were transitioning from a niche expensive gadget to a mass produced personal audio equipment. Both are made of plastic e the construction quality is not top notch; they are better than the most recent CD players, but they lack the feel of a metal body. The SL-XP1 has a 16 bit DAC with 8x oversampling as typical in the 80's; the SL-XP350 has a more modern 1 bit DAC: technics called it MASH, Philips BitStream but in the end they are all implementation of the sigma-delta converter with noise shaping. The big difference with more recent player from late 90's early 2000's is that they play LOUD, but also lack buffer memory and are very prone to skipping.