"Brian Gaff" wrote in message
...
OK I have a not that old but out of warranty Marantz cd player
which is supposed to and did play cdrw disc.

However over a time its stopped doing this and now has issues on
some, mainly home made but some commercial, discs as well. This
manifests itself as hunting either at the start or when you manually
move a track u the listing. It hunts for a couple of seconds then
gives up with an error in the display window. Unfortunately you need
to eject the disc to get it to look again.
I was just wondering whether this is just some drift in servos or a
problem with the laser.
This model was in fact from what I have seen, also sold as Philips
as the controls are in the same basic places and just the styling
and case is different, ie the Philips looks flimsy.

The other one is a brand new panasonic el cheapo dvd player. for
around 40 quid. As such it works fine, and can even apparently do
clever stuff with ram sticks.
The one snag is that when playing cds, it always ducks the sound
where a track marker is, so say, a live cd with no breaks but track
makers to help you find parts of the recording tends to sound like a
lot of small bits of live performance.
It also has an annoying habit of chopping of the last few seconds of
mp3 tracks both on cd and on ram sticks.
Looks to me like it needs some kind of firmware fix, but would not
know if this is true or its just a botched up cd player glued onto a
dvd player. This would not really matter if it were not for the fact
that the actual sound of it playing cds is amazingly good compared
to many higher priced players.
As I say, no head for part numbers but can get them when a pair of
eyes comes along later on.


The problem with the Marantz is likely dust on the lens. You can buy a
cleaner disc which has a row of small bristles on the playing side. An
aerosol duster blown on the lens when it is exposed also works.


--
Woody

harrogate3 at ntlworld dot com