kgallen

Tascam MD-801R UK Model (note: Keyboard/Remote PCB is missing, fluorescent display -30V inverter is missing and replaced with experimental solution) DSP=CXD2531BR (ATRAC1 v2) two-channel ATRAC encoder/decoder with separate CXD2525AR EFM/ACIRC encoder/decoder. BU-801 optional buffer RAM location (unpopulated in this machine) shown above. CXD2531BR_Sony.pdf CXD2525AQ-Sony.pdf

Sony MDS-E10 UK Model (Note: I've replaced the ML2020 battery above, but couldn't get the correct mount type, hence the blue wire) DSP=CXD2662AR (ATRAC1 Type-R/ATRAC3 MDLP)

Sony MDS-E12 UK Model DSP=CXD2662AR (ATRAC1 Type-R/ATRAC3 MDLP) Note: Front panel is mostly the same as MDS-E10 shown below. E12 input selection switch is between bal/unbal/coax.

Sony MDS-JE530 UK Model DSP=CXD2656AR (ATRAC1 Type-R)

Labelled: hmm... I do need a gold coloured screw...

From these two datasheets (one for the DLT-1150, one for the Cliff OTJ-5 [known to work and fit]), the pinout and pin pitch looks the same, but the mechanicals for the DLT-1150 are a little different - the plastic support pins are in a different position and there is no self-tapping screw hole for support. So you'll have to cut off the plastic lugs then be relying on the 3 soldered PCB connections. So electrically it will probably work (I didn't compare the electrical characteristic), but it will be mechanically weak - inserting a TOSLINK plug will tend to want to cam the connector on the PCB. Good luck - let us know how you get on. DLT-1150 Cliff OTJ-5

This is a relatively late model. They seem to have gone back to through hole components. How bizarre. At this date 2001-ish I'm very surprised surface mount wasn't far cheaper. Far easier for us now though!

Quite possibly perished load and drive belts. I can really help much more other than suggest you look for a Service Manual (Sony are generally pretty good with this) and try and figure out if your machine has any rubber belts and if you can find the spec of these if so. It’s possible you could find a seller on, say eBay, that can provide a kit of those required - although this is not fool proof depending on the knowledge and experience of the seller (wrong size belts, wrong type, missing belts).

Thanks Stephen. Hopefully I should be good with the hardware side of it (await crying post in a couple of weeks!). At this point I'm assuming that Win7 will have a built-in driver for the motherboard RS232 port as it will be part of the standard "AT" chipset that's been on every PC from the start of time (I think!). If not then i guess I'll need to get one of those USB-RS232 adaptors, but it seems silly to need to do so! (I have a real aversion to the USB mechanicals since it has no secure locking mechanism - although nowhere near as bad as HDMI, what an abortion that is - weak insecure plug/socket attached to a chunky cable, jeez what a joke...). I digress...

No rush! Do this when you're ready. I just wanted to check I hadn't missed your posting and you were wondering why no-one was playing with your new software! I'll be using it with an E12 (don't have an E11), so if you know of any obvious incompatibilities then let me know. First problem, possibly is to get a PC to use it's RS232 port... I have a Win 7Pro 32-bit with RS232 so it should be possible... :-)

I'm slightly embarrassed to ask as in theory I should be able to work it out... however this is slightly new territory for me. Ctrl-S is input only (e.g. MDS-E10, MDS-E12). Can this be driven from a Control-A1 [or Control-A1(II)] "output" to transfer titles from the Control-A1 MD to the Ctrl-S MD? From the SM, the MDS-E10 Ctrl-S input circuit is a little different to the Control-A1, but as @sfbp has said on a number of threads, these, plus SIRCS plus IR are all based around the "IR Remote Control" protocol. So has anyone tried this type of connection and did it work? Any issues with A1 vs A1(II) into Ctrl-S? Any limitations anyone has become aware of with Sony machines (say CDP-XE530, MDS-JE530, MDS-JE770 for instance?!). Thanks for any insight!

Jonas, this looks promising. Are you able to share your code? (Sorry if I’ve missed this above!) Kevin

Thanks! More to help others who might want to do the same. I wish I had better metal working tools (and skills!) It turned out I didn’t have any needle files when I came to square off the hole! Doh.

Motivated by the thread on MDS-JE470 optical output mod I thought I'd try similar with my 440, since it uses the same main board from the 640 and thus has all of the component pad-out and traces in place and just needs the components populating and a hole putting in the back panel. At risk of duplicating an oft-discussed topic, here is mine where I've use surface mount components that fit the existing pads. Parts list: (1) IC661: Cliff FCR684205T (OTJ-5) (currently available new in the UK from CPC for £1.36) (2) L661: 10uH 1210 SMD inductor (in my case I used Bourns CM322522-100K SMD Inductor) (3) C661: 100nF (0.1uF) 0805 ceramic chip capacitor (I used 0805 but the pads might actually be 0603 size) (I used these). 100nF is very common but don't stress it, anything from about 33nF up to 220nF will do if that's what you can get. (4) C662: 4.7uF electrolytic capacitor (through-hole) - just from my components box. This is a polarised component, so needs to be inserted into the PCB the correct way around (negative stripe near to IC661, see photos) (Use one that's 10V rated or above, it's on a 3.3V rail so you don't need to use a 50V device as on Sony's schematic). Likewise any part 4.7uF up to 22uF or so will be fine. The PCB is padded with a fairly wide via spacing, so pretty much any sensible electrolytic will fit. (5) Suitable labeller tapes - when these arrive I will label this socket similar to the factory-fit ones. You will need a very fine soldering iron tip, some fine solder and some tweezers to mount the SMD parts. You will also need some solder wick (or a solder sucker) to remove the solder which is already reflowed into the holes for the two through-hole components: the 4.7uF cap and the optical transmitter. The hole in the back panel is around 10mm square for the main part and a 3.5mm hole for the screw. Sorry this 440 looks so tatty - it was bought "cosmetically challenged" as spares-repairs [I think for a tenner], but since I have it working, I might as well use it as my "experimentation machine"! (In the photos, the 8mm hole you can see in the back panel is my next project when I source all of the components - to try and add Control-A1(II) to this 440. I might fail at this as somehow I might have to convince the machine firmware it's a 640, because it knows it's a 440 at the moment).

Ah yes, essentially SPDIF + SIRCS to/from USB. (I notice in the 980 SM how little there is drawn for the KB schematic - but all those telling links/jumpers that would relate to what @NGY shows in his PC-Link mod!)

Interesting, yes indeed it seems to be some fancy custom Sony DAC on the output side. According to the comments here, it seems Sony were magicians in high-end DACs. Why aren't we surprised... https://audiokarma.org/forums/index.php?threads/sony-x555es-cd-player-wow.280433/#post-3446709 You can tell this is a premium machine - they still use the AK4524 on the ADC (analogue input) side, but the DAC in that part is unused. Money to burn at this price point! (Edit: Replace snapshot with 1-page PDF, as the former was unreadable) 940_DAC_ADC.pdf

I think that's the DAC for the CD section (assuming we're still talking the MXD-D3 here). I'll see if I can find the SM... Hmm, no the CD section is one chip, IC101, a CXD2585. From whence is that IC201 you speak of?

I think it’s a typo, Stephen was mentioning similar the other day. Except for the early machines it’s one CXD (and one CXA) per MD drive. The early machines had multiple CXD devices since at that time (early 1990s) they couldn’t get all of the required circuitry on one chip, so the multiple functions required were partitioned into separate devices. On later machines they were able to integrate everything on one silicon chip. Here is the MZ-1, the first machine. It uses 5 separate chips where now we have one - one ATRAC chip [CXD2527] per stereo channel, a separate modulation encoder [CXD2525], a separate memory controller [CXD2526] and (standard) DRAM chip [MS514400] (for the 10 second memory buffer that is required for disc fragmentation and gives us the physical resistance to knocks and bumps). This is now all integrated onto one chip and of course the later ATRAC algorithm(s) are much more complicated and compute intensive than that in the first ATRAC1 v1.0 machine.

(Chimes in with more seemingly irrelevant information) My take on this is that it took the Sony engineers a few chip iterations to get the MDLP results to their satisfaction between the CXD2656 Type-R and CXD2662 production LP2/LP4 MDLP/Type-R. The deck chips seem to have an even part number. It is possible the odd numbers were used for internal engineering prototypes or highly integrated DSPs for the portables [*]. It’s possible that 2658 and 2660 were unsatisfactory attempts at implementing MDLP. Maybe 2658 adds LP2 only. Maybe 2660 was a first attempt at LP4 and it was so awful Sony felt they couldn’t release it. We will never know because this will be buried in the history and archives of Sony. There is no 2658 or 2660 [**] in any machine we know of. [*] Or for the CXA analogue companion chips to the digital CXD. However they did such a good job with the CXA2523 they never needed another one and this was the RF amp chip used from the mid-90’s to the current day. [**] Not true. CXD2660 was used in the MZ-B50. I couldn't find what ATRAC version is encoded, but this is a portable model from 2000. The case legends of the MZ-B50 don't proclaim Type-R or MDLP. I couldn't find anything in the User or Service manual regards the ATRAC version, but surely it can't be worst than Type-R?!

Mods - I just split this topic out to one correctly titled for the thread, since this belt size is important for many of our machines.

What's the drive then @NGY, is it an MDM5D like in the 530?

For those anal like me, if you have need for any SMT inductors like I describe above, for a Sony mod [note in @NGY's project above, the headphone board uses through-hole components] I came across these on eBay (UK) the other day: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Bourns-CM322522-100K-SMD-Inductor-10uH-1210-Pk-of-10/202771742580?ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&_trksid=p2060353.m2749.l2649 (I already bought a batch for my intended 440 optical out mod...) He's got lots but if this thread is read in the future or somewhere else on the planet without eBay UK access needs some, you're looking for 10uH 1210 SMD (1210 is the size, which is a spec you'll need along with the inductance value of 10 micro-henry).

Well @NGY sterling work indeed. We treasure you for it, even if we (I) drive you to distraction! However I do not own any of these machines so I will leave the fun to those who do! The only contribution I can make here is to help out with a couple of comments above regarding 100R resistors and 10uH inductors (ferrite beads)... Often you will see 100R resistors inline to a digital connection. Why so? Is there a significance to where they are drawn in the schematic? Indeed there is. Often you will see a small value series resistor in a digital line. On the schematic it is shown near to the driver of the signal - the output of an IC usually. This is a series termination and on the PCB it should be placed physically close to the source (driver) rather than the sink of the signal. This resistor helps match the electrical impedance of the driver to the electrical impedance of the PCB trace. It is there to give a better wave-shape to the digital signal - to help avoid transient overshoots and minimise signal reflection and ringing (refer to transmission line theory). As well as helping signal integrity, this helps minimise the generation of high frequency harmonics due to these transients. This reduces the emission of unwanted radio frequency signals from these high speed digital circuits. This helps with EMC compliance which has been part of equipment design requirements and international standards since the 1990s. The purpose of EMC compliance is to minimise how much electrical interference (emission of spurious radio frequency signals) a piece of equipment can generate such that it does not disturb the operation of another piece of nearby equipment. So what about these inductor/ferrite bead things then? Well this is a similar story. Have you seen those fat bulges or clip-on lumps on some cables - often seen on VGA cables and laptop power supply DC cables. Well these little inductors - or ferrite beads - we see on Sony schematics are there for the same reason. You will generally see these components in the power supply lines, +5V and GND for example, to internal components - often the TOSLINK transmitters/receivers - but also in supply signals going out to external connectors - like the PS/2 DIN connector we're interested in this thread. An inductor (or ferrite bead) has very low impedance (resistance) to a low frequency - or DC - signal, like a +5V power rail. But it has a very high impedance (a high ac resistance) to a high frequency signal (which is why you won't usually find them in signal lines - for this purpose anyway) - like these radio frequency signals that are generated inside our equipment. What these ferrite beads do, is restrict the amount of this RF energy that "leaks out" of our equipment into cables that connect our equipment to some other piece of equipment. These external cables can act as aerials (antenna), spraying our internal electrical noise outside of the equipment. This leads to EMC compliance failures during equipment compliance testing because these noise signals can disturb the operation of other equipment. So what about when we are doing "user hacks" to our equipment? Well if the intended circuit has these components in the design but they are not populated on our board what do we do? Well this depends on if you intend to sell the equipment. And if you do, will there be any "come back" on you if your modified equipment disturbs the new owner's pace-maker (example!). So let's summarise and say - if you want to "do it properly", then ideally you will source and fit these ferrite beads per the original design. This means the modified equipment would be expected to comply to the EMC regulations of that piece of equipment - with that function - when it was built at Sony's factory. (Note: There is considerable variability shown across designs and we see a range of implementations in this area even from Sony - from inductors, resistors to plain wire links - there is no definitive answer. Economics and profit margins are always at play - saving 5 cents on a component will always be asked from the engineering teams on consumer products. Note2: The "do it property" was in no way intended a criticism or "sleight" on @NGY's comments above, I was more commenting on approaches we may take to our own modifications.) Conversely, if you don't give a damn and the equipment is only for your own use, then you are probably going to put a wire link or 0R resistor there instead of the ferrite bead - i.e. something you already have in your spares box. The function of the design won't be any different, you'll just be spraying a few more radio waves about inside your house. Regarding the 100R series terminators - similar to above, but in most cases you will get away without these. Not fitting them is likely to mean internal signals can be a little more "dirty". In extreme cases this can lead to errors in digital signals (interpreting a 1 instead of a 0 and vise-versa). In many cases this may go unnoticed (would you be able to hear a 1-bit error in your music?). On signals related to the microcontroller, this may cause the machine to crash or hang. Jeez, I thought I was going to write a couple of lines. Don't invite me here again... But aside, maybe you learned something new about electronics and some of those squiggles in the schematic diagrams we speak about so often are step-by-step a little less mystifying. Let us know how you get on... Example of 10uH ferrite beads in an external connection (like L805/L806 referenced above): Example of 100R series terminator on high speed digital signals:

I'm saying nothing more on the subject otherwise I will get told off! :-P

Why? Charlie ordered 50 and my first order was 10 of them! You only ordered one over!