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Philips CD 104

sq225917

sq225917

Bit of this, bit of that
I'm listening a classic today an unfettled Philip's cd 104. You know it's not bad for 14 bits.
 
They sound great but are unreliable. Give it a while and it'll probably start making loud cracks or low level distortion from one channel or it'll stop recognising discs or find some other way of playing up... Often they will wait for 2-3 days from when you power up an old one, long enough for you to really like the sound... then it starts... and usually from then on it will play up either permanently or after about 30 mins to an hour... You may get lucky but the 4 I've had have all gone down this route... the recommended resoldering etc of all the through hole eyelets didn't work!
 
Arkless Electronics said:
They sound great but are unreliable. Give it a while and it'll probably start making loud cracks or low level distortion from one channel or it'll stop recognising discs or find some other way of playing up... Often they will wait for 2-3 days from when you power up an old one, long enough for you to really like the sound... then it starts... and usually from then on it will play up either permanently or after about 30 mins to an hour... You may get lucky but the 4 I've had have all gone down this route... the recommended resoldering etc of all the through hole eyelets didn't work!
Click to expand...

Don’t just resolder the eyelets - drill a hole through the middle of them and feed tinned copper wire through, then resolder :) Both the top PCB and the one below. Fantastic sounding players, especially with a simple discrete output stage fitted, but way too expensive here in CH now for the most part.

Jez - do you still have any? :)
 
Dowser said:
Don’t just resolder the eyelets - drill a hole through the middle of them and feed tinned copper wire through, then resolder :) Both the top PCB and the one below. Fantastic sounding players, especially with a simple discrete output stage fitted, but way too expensive here in CH now for the most part.

Jez - do you still have any? :)
Click to expand...

I did just that yes but not sure if I did the bottom board.... I did fit top spec op amps and better caps etc to one and they can indeed sound very good.
The problem I keep seeing on these (and some other units using Philips IC's) is that Philips' LSI IC's from those days just don't seem to last and eventually get all sorts of faults beyond simply failing altogether... often when they warm up. One CD104 was rendered usable by gluing a heatsink to the top of the DAC so it never got quite warm enough to start playing up! I had to replace the Philips Dac IC's on my DPA DAC and on a customers due to clicks, bangs or distortion starting after 30 mins also.....

I think I have 3 still but I may yet try and make a good one out of all of them...
 
:)

The 1540/1s do fail with clicking regularly, I often wondered if related to failing caps on the rails to it as they age, but even Stan fitted alloy plates in his designs from new. For sure, a clicking one can be fixed for a while by adding a heat sink to it.

My experience of the eyelets dates back to the early 90s in Australia (so before electrolytics started to fail too!) - they caused problems even then when relatively new, only guaranteed fix was to do both boards (if they have them - there were a few models from memory, not all used eyelets on bottom board) - pita to do properly, around 2 hours to do all from memory.

I used to mod them with a single transistor output stage, biased with an LED, bypassing opamps and filters (power on CDP before pre, accept clicks when skipping tracks, etc). Very crude, but sounded wonderful.

I just searched again and found a sensibly priced 204 with only a day to go locally :)
 
Dowser said:
:)

The 1540/1s do fail with clicking regularly, I often wondered if related to failing caps on the rails to it as they age, but even Stan fitted alloy plates in his designs from new. For sure, a clicking one can be fixed for a while by adding a heat sink to it.

My experience of the eyelets dates back to the early 90s in Australia (so before electrolytics started to fail too!) - they caused problems even then when relatively new, only guaranteed fix was to do both boards (if they have them - there were a few models from memory, not all used eyelets on bottom board) - pita to do properly, around 2 hours to do all from memory.

I used to mod them with a single transistor output stage, biased with an LED, bypassing opamps and filters (power on CDP before pre, accept clicks when skipping tracks, etc). Very crude, but sounded wonderful.

I just searched again and found a sensibly priced 204 with only a day to go locally :)
Click to expand...

The bottom board not having any eyelets and being of obviously different manufacturing process even rings a bell on the ones I have.

The most reliable I have was one which a certain Mr Surgeoner of NEAT speakers smashed against a wall several times after it played up.... it was his stock to do what he wanted with I guess! Half an hour later he gave me it for spares... and I gave myself a little challenge to see if I could fix it.... other than some broken cogs on the tray mech meaning it needed erm... "light manual assistance" to get the draw to open or close.. and was accompanied by gogs grinding noise... it worked for longer than all of them!
 
Metal/alloy chassis - bludgeon someone to death with one and it’ll still work :)
 
If you want an early 14bit Philips or Marantz player and you're worried about reliability then look for a CD74 or CD84; built like tanks and made in Japan, I know a few and all are still going without issues. Oh, and they sound good too.

Having said that, I still have a Mission DAD7000R and a Beogram CDX, both based on the CD104, and both are still working just fine.
 
Had it to bits this weekend all the through board stuff has all ready been done. Looks like this one will run and run
 
Just done the through the board stuff on mine - runs like a dream and sounds great. They have a lot to commend them.
 
I picked up the cd204 I was eying last weekend - will be a while before I can play with it though. I’ve never heard of a failed early Philips laser :)
 
Talking about 14 Bit: I had an ancient Revox CD Player, a B225 IIRC, that I’d landed for peanuts from a radio station. It wasn’t very good at all having obvious quantisation distortion or something similar that was audible on very quiet classical passages - it reminded me of a low-bit sampler such as an Ensonic Mirage etc down at that level, just a nasty distorted sound. A shame as on louder CDs it sounded rather good, but I concluded it was no match for the RCD965BX I had at the time and moved it on. It may have been broken/faulty I guess, but I assumed (possibly wrongly) it was the lack of bit depth and therefore dynamic ability. It surprised me anyhow as I’d have expected a Revox to play classical CDs, even really quiet ones!
 
Tony L said:
Talking about 14 Bit: I had an ancient Revox CD Player, a B225 IIRC, that I’d landed for peanuts from a radio station. It wasn’t very good at all having obvious quantisation distortion or something similar that was audible on very quiet classical passages - it reminded me of a low-bit sampler such as an Ensonic Mirage etc down at that level, just a nasty distorted sound. A shame as on louder CDs it sounded rather good, but I concluded it was no match for the RCD965BX I had at the time and moved it on. It may have been broken/faulty I guess, but I assumed (possibly wrongly) it was the lack of bit depth and therefore dynamic ability. It surprised me anyhow as I’d have expected a Revox to play classical CDs, even really quiet ones!
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As I said earlier oversampling allows 16 bit resolution from a 14 bit DAC, whatever you were hearing was not due to the resolution being 14 bits because the player is capable of resolving 16 bits.
 
Just FYI - Revox B226 can be a good source of single/dual crown A’s :). Here in CH they go for far too much money so I’ve never owned one, and those I’ve heard have not sounded great (compared to other 1540/41 players - compared to other dac chips still good).

Tony - as above, yours must have been faulty
 
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