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Sony CDP-791 skipping

eisenach

pfm Member
I've just unexpectedly bought one of these (wine and ebay, not a good mix). It's in good condition, sounds quite good if a bit light-weight, but it skips, sometimes just a bit, sometimes more. I haven't had it apart yet, but I suspect the rails need cleaning and lubricating. What should I use for each of those tasks?

There's not a lot about the player itself on-line, but loads of contradictory ideas about cleaning rails (e.g. use Vaseline/ never use Vaseline/ clean and run dry/ ...).

I know there are some Sony CDP refurbish experts on here. What do you do?

Was the 791 considered to be a good one? It's aparently the same as the american market X111ES.
 
You can try cleaning the sled rails and re-greasing, use white lithium grease (If you have the spray kind, spray it onto a cloth and apply it onto the rails from the cloth), you only need a tiny amount of grease.

If that fails it’ll likely be the laser pickup failing, I’m pretty sure that machine uses a KSS-240A pickup (it’ll say on the label near where the ribbon cable plugs into the pickup), they do tend to fail after a few years but third party replacements are available and in my experience, work just fine. They’re inexpensive, they don’t need any shorting links removed and shouldn’t require any adjustment.
 
I've just unexpectedly bought one of these (wine and ebay, not a good mix). It's in good condition, sounds quite good if a bit light-weight, but it skips, sometimes just a bit, sometimes more. I haven't had it apart yet, but I suspect the rails need cleaning and lubricating. What should I use for each of those tasks?

There's not a lot about the player itself on-line, but loads of contradictory ideas about cleaning rails (e.g. use Vaseline/ never use Vaseline/ clean and run dry/ ...).

I know there are some Sony CDP refurbish experts on here. What do you do?

Was the 791 considered to be a good one? It's aparently the same as the american market X111ES.

The earlier, and slightly uprange, CDP 990 was my first substantial brand new hi fi purchase for £300 in 1990. Binned it once it stopped reading discs aftyer about 10 years of heavy use. I know loads of people that bought mid priced players in the early to mid 90's and heard a lot of them. Any offering from Sony, Rotel or Marantz from this era in the £250 - £400 range were universally excellent to my ears and there's very little to choose between them.

I haven't heard the ES machines, but these were priced higher. Others may know more, but didn't these have the Gibraltar chassis?
 
Thank you both! Simple solutions are the best. I cleaned the lens with one of those tacky cleaning discs, and it's just played an entire disc through with no problems. I don't know why I didn't think of that first. :) You've just saved me a lot of time and fuss. Thanks.

So now it's working, the next thing: it came without a remote. I can't find an original replacement at a reasonable price, but there are plenty of other cheap Sony CD player remotes around. Do they mostly share the same codes? Will more-or-less any old Sony remote control the basics of any old Sony CD player ?

Thanks in anticipation.
 
That's a good result but it's worthwhile to give the lens a better clean, those discs are horrid.

Take the lid off (it'll just be few screws) and gently clean the laser with a clean cotton bud moistened (not dripping wet!) with lens cleaning fluid. Polish with a second dry cotton bud until spotless.

If you don't have lens cleaner to hand simply breath on the lens to fog it and polish dry with a clean cotton bud.
 
Thank you all. I'll try a cheap ebay remote.
It's still working, Mike, and I know those discs are pretty rubbish, but so far so good. If it plays up again, I'll do as you say. Thanks.
 
When you have a spare few minutes it'd be well worth doing. With the lens properly clean you may find it plays scratched discs much better and you may even get an improvement in sound quality.

Sony remotes are pretty universal in my experience too. The best bet is to find a remote which has a similar part number to the correct one and looks very similar e.g. if the correct remote is say RM-650 for example and you can find an RM-660 and it look similar, then chance are it'll work fine.
 
Doh! I was going to suggest that, but because no-one else had I lost confidence. I thought perhaps the 791 might have a self-cleaning lens or something similar that everyone except me knew about, and people would then point at me laughing and expose me as the fraud that I am.

Lol !
 


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