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Naim CD5 laser replacement

keithsnaim

keithsnaim

Gone Fishing
I have been trawling through all the threads on this subject. I seem to remember reading a thread that gave a list of all the donor players that used the same mechanism/laser assembly , but cannot find it. Anyone else remember this.

Keith
 
Cheers Mark. I have sourced a CD5 for a mate at a good price and thought about the laser if the problem occurred in the future.

Keith
 
Here's my experience: The lasers aren't nearly as robust as the earlier CDM4 based players. The CD12.4 was readily available for peanuts and I used to have to try several examples before I could find ones that reliably worked. Too soon the quality of even those dropped to a point where I had to stop trying to fit them. I see now they're about 4x the price they were 5 or so years back. I don't know if this means they're better though - I haven't tried any for years. YMMV.
 
Thanks for that Mark. You did actually service my own CD5 and replace the laser, plus did the mod also. Must have been about 5 years ago. Still working and sounding superb.
 
My CDX VAM1205 CDM12.5 went bad about a year or two ago - I think the CD5 uses the same mechanism, I ordered a few from China, I think it was these -
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/328...earchweb0_0,searchweb201602_,searchweb201603_
The first one I ordered from another place had a grey ferrite magnet on the spindle and it wasn't very strong so CDs slipped, the next 2 which I think was from the above link had the silver moly or neo magnet which was ok. In the end they all worked ok apart from the slipping magnet one during disc runup, and eventually I figured out the problem was in fact the laser block worm drive motor so I put the original Naim / Philips mech back and just swapped that motor.
Now I have a couple of spares - I'm just making the point that the (genuine - hahahaha) made in China ones seem to be ok and definately better than scrapping a Naim CDX or CD5.
Oh and BTW the CDM12.4 and CDM12.5 are identical EXCEPT for the spindle motor -
1204 = DC motor
1205 = Hall effect motor
And you cannot change the spindle motor coz the hub is glued onto the motor shaft, everything else comes apart though.
 
Hi guys, new around these parts as found forum looking for CD5 info.
I have a CD5 here that been kicking about for years so i thought I'd make an effort to try and get it going again.
Managed to get a replacement pickup from Cricklewood Electronics, they have either the 12.4 mech or just the pickup. I ordered just the pickup and have installed it into the old mech.
So now it looks better as the disc will spin up initially (before it just used to kick the spindle motor..) but its not reading the TOC reliably.
After a number of manual play attempts it will and start playing a disc, the whole disc and seems to be very fast accessing different tracks with big jumps so tracking seems OK.
When you can get it to play a disc it does drop out and you hear distortion where the error correction flakes out at times.
Tried the puck stuff, its not that. I have a disc in there now where I've used a small piece of very thing double sided sticky tape on the hub part so the disc is not slipping.
All the supply rails appear to be OK, i think its just the pickup might not just be a good enough performance spec for the player.
Is there anything else i can try, i don't want to start buying more pickups in hope one might just work by chance..
Its really had to take measurements in operation due to the way its built, can't really get at anything to probe signals with a scope around the servo processor.
Also no service data about, I've just been trawling the web looking at sites with only ones with mods to do to glean any info.
Cheers
 
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^ That was my experience.
When I used to service these players we'd have to buy 4 transports to get one working one, then the quality got so bad we had to give up. There's a polystyrene cap behind the ribbon cable on the main board where you can pick up the eye pattern of the laser output. You can quite clearly see the dropout from the bad lasers on these - it was always the laser assembly, no matter how much I poked around the servo board and changed parts. When you do find a good one then you can put the player in self-test mode with a good known disk by holding play whilst you power it up. It will then count the number of uncorrectable read errors. Good luck.
 
That's crazy! I nearly brought 2 pickups having read your post a few weeks back but just went for the one.
Its was showing the same symptoms I've seen on other players so like you say its definitely looks like the pickup failed initially. It just wouldn't read the disk at all, just kicked the spindle motor when loading a disk.
Seeing how it's doing more with a new pickup but still dropping out i don't suspect anything else.
If i get bored I'll pull the lid off again and have a look to see if i can pick the EFM signal up.
I guess l'll list it as spares or repair, not sure what they're worth in this condition these days?
I think i read someone send there's back to Naim and they managed to do it for £330.
Not sure if its worth spending the money on really, though what i have heard out of it when it has worked for a short period of time was good.
 
Gonzini said:
That's crazy! I nearly brought 2 pickups having read your post a few weeks back but just went for the one.
Its was showing the same symptoms I've seen on other players so like you say its definitely looks like the pickup failed initially. It just wouldn't read the disk at all, just kicked the spindle motor when loading a disk.
Seeing how it's doing more with a new pickup but still dropping out i don't suspect anything else.
Click to expand...

Just FYI, I don't know exactly what symptoms your CD5 has right now, but my CDX would skip on tracks but only towards the end of the CD (outer edge of CD) and sometimes just give up and show ERR on the display. In the end it turned out to be the motor that moves the laser block so don't just assume it's the laser itself that is the problem.
 
I think the drive motors OK. It can drop out at any point across the disc. Some disks work better than others.
When it works disk access is really fast jumping between tracks.
But its not new so guess all a bit worn to some degree so hard to really say.
 
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