Skip when you breathe on ‘em?

Hey everyone, I recent acquired a few Sony Discman units and a couple other brands of portable CD players. I’ve noticed that a few of them - in particular my Sony D-11 & D-12 - will skip with the slightest vibration. I’m talking pick it up off the table and it skips. Or breathe too heavily on it and it skips (ok that might be a bit of an exaggeration..).

I don’t recall these things being quite that crazy sensitive - is this due to some aging / worn components, or is my rose colored glasses memory not quite accurate? I recall a buddy owning one very similar to the D-11, or at least from that timeframe, and he take it walking all the time & a couple times demonstrated how skip resistant it was by gently knocking on it, and it wouldn’t skip a beat. Did he perhaps have a model that was more skip resistant, or do my units have a problem? His definitely wasn’t one with any sort of anti-skip technology, so I’m curious what’s the deal.

 

You might want to check the suspension that the laser travels in and see if it has any. The springs may have gone soft and or it may be settled if you will on the chassis and not have any suspension left. Therefore, when you tap it in it, it immediately move the laser and therefore skips.

 

My Sony D50 is already skipping when I look at it. It's super sensitive for everything. I've got two of them and both do the same. A Sony CFD-5 boombox with the same kind of CD player does exactly the same. I guess thats how it was before signal buffering was the norm.

 

Thanks for the pointer - I’ll try disassembling one of them and see what I can find. Springs and lube on the laser movement will be my first attempts.

Thanks guys! This is rapidly turning into a fun little addiction

 

A lot of early CD players were like that. I recall the company I work for organising a Line Dance class in an upstairs room. The instructor was trying to use a Goodmans portable CD unit so you can imagine the result. It ended up with someone having to stand there holding the unit to avoid skipping. Human shock protection and definitely not

Another memory is CD based jukeboxes in pubs getting stuck. Unlike records, which will loop every 1.3 seconds a stuck CD sounds more like a machine gun.

Something I like about the more modern Sony Walkman CD players is that the transports rarely skip, even if you turn the shock protection off.