Laserdisc Service

Recently, I received a dead Pioneer CLD-V870 Karaoke style Laserdisc player.  When plugged in, there was no standby light. I performed the usual step of removing D105 surge suppressor from the power board since this commonly failed on some later models.  I clipped both ends and removed it, then replaced the fuse with a known working one.    Still, the standby light nor the unit would come on. Next, I had to manually wind the gears to get the tray to eject.  Once the tray was out, the power supply could be safely unscrewed and removed.  I inspected the board and found a number of capacitors.  Rather than troubleshoot one by one, I took an inventory and ordered replacement caps from Digi-Key.  I saved the list of capacitors for VWR1269.  Link here Before de-soldering any of the old caps, it is a good idea to mark the tops of each cap with the same directional line.  In my case, I drew a line pointing towards the front of the unit....

During the later years of Laserdisc in 1995, Pioneer started releasing Laserdiscs with AC-3 sound capability.  This meant you could get 5.1 surround sound on newer movies, as long as your player supported it and you could feed the audio signal into a demodulator or processor. The big difference between processors and demodulators are the capabilities and how they output their signal to a receiver.  Demodulators normally have an input for AC-3 via a coax connection and sometimes will have an input for TOSLINK(SPDIF) optical.  From there, the demodulator processes the signals and outputs them via a single cable to a receiver whether that be coax or optical.   Example of a demodulator - Pioneer RFD-1 Processors, however, would normally output their sound via 6 discrete cables.  On receivers, these are sometimes referred to as Multi Channel In.  The 6 channels are Front Left, Center, Front Right, Subwoofer, Surround Left and Surround Right.  This is all we...