Leaderboard

Sounds like the sled cannot find the right positon for reading the TOC. Might be a dental problem :-) . (direct link) (another one here)

MDS-JE520 Yesterday night I played with a faulty deck, and here is what I found. I bought this MDS-JE520 on ebay for parts originally, it was fairly cheap, so I did not mind stripping it down. But as usual, first I wanted to understand, what is the cause for the fault. The deck would not accept any discs, after loading one, it would try to read it, but then it would eject with C13. I had already some idea, that there can be multiple reasons for a deck rejecting a disc, however, here came another one I would have never thought of. Before jumping on it, here is a little puzzle: can you spot any differences? Left one is the drive of the 520 exhibiting a C13 error, right one is another 520, that works OK. . Yes, one part is missing, a spring! Here is the "difference": I had no clue, where actually the spring was, because it was not inside the deck when I opened it. More than that, how could that spring jump off? It takes an effort and a tool to take it out of its place. OK, but then what's the problem? It looks that the drive loads the disc halfway only, and cannot lower it into its nest, because this spring is responsible for holding the loading tray in the required position. Once the disc is not fully loaded, it would certainly not spin, and the laser would not read anything - disc error, eject. On the left the disc is stuck halfway, on the right it is properly loaded (well, I did it manually, for the sake of the photo): . For a quick test I lent the same spring from the other 520, and presto, the C13 error disappeared! Now, how can I destroy this unit for parts, when it is in full working order :-) ?