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!
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?
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
I'm listening a classic today an unfettled Philip's cd 104. You know it's not bad for 14 bits.
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!