I wrote a few years ago in an an early post on this blog about repairing a Teac CD player. I was able to replace the whole of the laser assembly to give it a new lease of life.
Fast-forward a few years, and the same problem I originally had began to occur again in that the player began skipping and jumping all over the place and being essentially unusable. It is quite strange that exactly the same fault has happened again. It seems unlikely that the fault lies with the laser mechanism itself as this is a standard and very common part. However the replacement I got was a cheap Chinese copy rather than a genuine Sanyo one. Perhaps there is some kind of design fault in the player itself which leads to premature laser failure?
Anyway I went through the same routine again and ordered first a new laser head, and then a new laser assembly which at least purported to be a real one (it had ‘Sanyo’ stamped on it this time).
I did however learn a useful lesson which is to read my own posts! I fitted first the laser head – and it didn’t work. Assuming it was faulty I then ordered a new assembly, and that didn’t work either. Checking back on my post I remember the bit about removing the solder bridge. The two parts I had got did not come with any documentation at all, and so I had assumed that this wasn’t required. However, when I looked closely at the new parts sure enough they did have the solder bridge on them (and in exactly the same place), and removing it led to everything work perfectly again.
Given how plentiful these parts are on ebay and other sites, there is a surprising lack of documentation highlighting this point. I had reported to the seller in good faith that the laser head I bought did not work and he refunded me immediately which was great – but if he’d suggested I check the bridge this probably wouldn’t have been needed. Also the Ebay listings for the parts talk all about them but again don’t mention this requirement.
So the main purpose of the is post is to say that if you are trying to repair an old CD player with one of these parts or something like it, and you are having trouble, check if there is a solder bridge there and if there is then remove it. I suspect that this is common knowledge among people who do this all the time, but for the tinkerer like me it certainly wasn’t!
The details of this are contained in my original post here. There are also some Youtube videos showing similar things in other assemblies such as for games consoles.