My Panasonic RX-DT75 has run into some trouble. My efforts to get it to play a probably bootleg copy of the 1996 seasonal album This Is Christmas by Luther Vandross have made a mess of its electronics. The laser pickup (or "focusing platform") is now somehow stuck. I hear a slight clicking sound of it trying to "read" a compact disc -- any CD -- but to no avail. My smaller, cheaper JVC RD-T7 has been able to "read" and play the darned CD in recent years -- but only barely. The sound quality of that CD is very bad when played with the 'T7. (Well, the first two tracks are of that ten-song, ten-track recording, at any rate. Of course, I'm not faulting the singing and recording skills of the late Mr Vandross; he was a fine musician, God rest his soul.) The CD-"burner" that we have here in our home seems to play the infernal CD just fine, as does the Bose Wave Radio/CD we have. (Their superior, pricier anti-shock, oversampling and tracking-laser electronics, no doubt.) The various "hacks" to fix a finicky CD player that I have seen in YouTube clips today don't seem to address the problem in a "Cobra top" Panasonic or in a somewhat similar boombox with a mid-centred CD player or with a CD player built into the bottom third or bottom fifth of that unit. Some of the CD player sound systems in the video clips are boomboxes with top-mounted CD players. (That can give one false hope of a quick "just reach in and poke something" fix.) Other CD players in those clips are home-stereo-type CD players, not boombox-type units like my now-afflicted Panny. In any case, those "hacks" involve opening up the sound system to explore the electromechanical intricacies of capacitors, cogs, gears, wires, integrated circuit boards and all. I am still not a repairer -- despite any talk of "The (Transmogrifying) Magic Of Christmas" -- and I am thus even less willing to chance totally botching up the 'DT75 than I was with the Aiwa CS-600U. (Yes, I needed professional "rescuing," the costs included, with that one SMH) A quote attributed to Erica Jong states: Advice is what we seek when we know the answer but wish we didn't. I suspect that I know the answer to this long message of mine: either risk damaging the big, elegant Panasonic RX-DT75 further by opening up the stereo with a sufficiently long screwdriver and hoping that I'll need to spend under fifty bucks for replacement parts (shipping included) or I cough up the sheaf of cash to make it worth the while of some professional repairer. Either way, the "king" of my boombox collection is now halfway to being "an elegant, oversized doorstop!" Not a nice way to end this year -- or any year. ------------ I GOT MY EYE ON YOU
The clicks stink and without opening it up, it might not be repairable. There's a lot of little gear teeth hidden under the plastic that can either break, get dirty or have the lubricant thicken to the point that it no longer works. The good news is most of these gears are ok but need to either be set back in their track or cleaned and relubed. I'm speaking of all equipment and not your particular model which may have a common engineering or design failure. I don't play around with my CDs enough, but believe it or not, I still burn them once in a while for other projects. Depending on burner and blank discs, some of CDs didn't last too many years, at least not the "forever" we were promised in the early days. I would test it with a pre-recorded CD and if it's not reading then I would suspect a mechanical error in the box. Some CD players have belts, just like cassette decks so there's a chance a belt might be broken but again, it needs to opened up and exposed to know for sure. Good luck Easthelp, I like looking inside of these things so it's a little easier for me but I understand the frustration when your player stops working.
Thanks for the reply, Mister X. I know that this reply of mine is months late, but your response still offers good advice. At the risk of being embarrassed and quite, quite scared over something going wrong again, I state here that the reported problem with the Panasonic RX-DT75 seems to have been solved -- that same day, in fact. I spent a while on this computer here in our home, among other things, composing messages asking for help and advice and searching for possibly solutions in video clips uploaded to YouTube. It seems that some hours of being unplugged and thus inactive were enough to permit (or prompt) the CD player's "focusing platform" electronics to lose whatever aberrant "memory" they had apparently developed from trying and failing to "read" and then play that seasonal CD of clearly teeth-gritting quality. Well, hopefully the 'DT75 behaves itself during the next listening session I have with it. Take care.
