hi all...what actually happens to a cd laser when it breaks.....does it just wear out or what ????

One of a number of things could happen, but mostly likely cause of failure is the semi-conductor chip generating the laser burns out or the light detector fails. The focusing or mechanics in general can also fail.

Sometimes you can get lucky and all it needs is a gentle blast of canned air to clear out dust.

i'de love to know myself dave,well not so much now,but years ago when i used to fix stuff,and games consoles ect..i dont really need to know asmuch now because i'm and mp3 player man now..but it would be good for someone to go into deep details and explain

They break because there rubbish same as cd..

Old thread.  Sorry.   But just wanted to add in case it helps someone.  I just 'repaired' a non working lens by physically tweaking it.  I'd cleaned it to no avail.  Taken the unit completely apart to look for any thing visually amiss.  And finally, with nothing left to lose, just took a fine wooden pick and shoved the lens toward six o'clock fairly aggressively.    Popped the disc back in and viola.... it lives!   But it skipped a couple of times per track. But evidently these (at least this one) responds to being shoved a bit. It can't be the springs being tweaked since the whole lens only moves a few mm or so. It must be the carriage itself that the springs are attached to. 

I tweaked it back in the other direction with a little less force hoping for some middle result.  In the end I had to play,  remove, tweak,  play, remove, tweak..... about half a dozen times to get it 99 percent right.   I've gone through 10 discs this afternoon without a single hiccup. Yay.   

It's very nice little "boom box" desktop radio that I picked up at Goodwill last week.  I was looking for a box for FM radio mostly since I listen to web streaming sites and webcasts of fm stations via an FM transmitter hooked up to my PC.  I wanted a decent looking and sounding box to sit on the kitchen counter while I worked.  There were four boomboxes of various quality on the shelf, none of the 'vintage' stuff so prized in this forum but decent names.  I plugged them all in and wasn't really happy at all with the sound.  And why the hell don't boxes today have any tone controls?

So at the last minute I grabbed this inconspicuous little Sony priced at five dollars and plugged it in. 

Tuned in a station and was astonished!  I mean, this isn't audiophile stuff, but apparently this is Sony's version of the Bose Wave.  It even has a knob for continuously variable bass control. 

I took it apart when I got home to try to get the CD player to work and found two nicely built little speakers up front and a little long throw woofer in the back with rubber half roll surround that is slot loaded into that port in the front.  Everything inside really solid and well built.  This model was made in Japan, not China, and is dated 1992.  Looks like it was never even used.   The cd player probably quit a long, long time ago and the owner just tucked it away in the box.

I may have a brandnew laser assy for it. What the part# on the laser assy