The Sony Playstation as a dedicated CD player

[Wakefield Turntables]

HI!

Has anyone tried pimping one of these babies yet?? I'm just in the process of stripping out the main PCB of excessive caps in the RCA output path, and installing a remote contol!! This is one hell of a way to start to learn how your CD player works and feeding my addictive habit of tweeking! Next few days I'll be raiding Maplins for power supply cases, next tweek will be to seperate the power supply into seperate case just like my 1210!

Andy

[Ian Walker]

Hi Andy,

I for one would very interested in this,Nick Lurcher too i think.

Please keep us posted on any progress.

Ian.

[colinB]

And me. I use it as my main digital source at the moment.

[Alex_UK]

Just for clarity - I think Andrew is talking about the original Sony Playstation (now retrospectively referred to as the PS1) - the original versions of which are "legendary" for their audio prowess.

(Has to be a "SCPH-1001/2" version, though...) Plenty of info on the web - here's a start... http://www.6moons.com/audioreviews/leben2/system.html

[Macca]

Just for clarity - I think Andrew is talking about the original Sony Playstation (now retrospectively referred to as the PS1) - the original versions of which are "legendary" for their audio prowess.

(Has to be a "SCPH-1001/2" version, though...) Plenty of info on the web - here's a start... http://www.6moons.com/audioreviews/leben2/system.html

Indeed they used to be available on e-bay ready modified but I don't know if this is still the case. Never heard one, though.

[colinB]

Oops. Thanks Alex.

[Alex_UK]

I may yet be wrong, just didn't want you all getting too excited! :)

[Wakefield Turntables]

OK, started tonight. I removed a mod chip from the underside of the PS1 PCB. There are MANY mods, I'll try and take some photo's as I go along. I'd like to add this PS1 in my valve system.

[colinB]

You do know you cant play Gran Turismo 5 on one of those dont you.

[aquapiranha]

If you are talking about the origional PS1, then yes I have heard one. It was modded too by our very own John Blackburn who was good enough to bring it over to mine together with a few chip amps he had put together, all in various states of 'undress' as is the modder's way.

I thought it was very good, though in fairness it didn't get a thorough going over.

Plenty on t'web about it.

[Wakefield Turntables]

This is just a little side project that I'm working on. It's a distraction from spending loads on a new CD player. I want to see how little I can spend on it. My reference CD player is not a very good one, its only a Marantz CD63SE. Currently I prefer the Marantz. Still, I love tweaking so it keeps me out of trouble with the old bread knife! :lol:

[colinB]

Sounds like a good project.

[Wakefield Turntables]

Total spend so far
£10 for the PS1

£2.69 for some 12mm running spikes that I'm going to glue to the underside of the PS1 to give it some isolation.

next spend £2.49 for a remote control unit from fleabay. I'm gonna be spending big time in next few days when i go to maplin to buy a power supply case, a massive £9?!!!

I think the biggest expense will be a piece of sheet copper I'm going to need to buy to make a decent heak sink / screen for the main PCB, the vast majority of German pimped PS1's seem to have one!

[BTH K10A]

You mean one of these

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAH5-hDlFUM

Mick Feuerbacher's tips on getting the laser focused is essential on the SCPH1002 models as they seem frome to skipping.

[aquapiranha]

You mean one of these

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAH5-hDlFUM

Mick Feuerbacher's tips on getting the laser focused is essential on the SCPH1002 models as they seem frome to skipping.

See this illustrates precisely my problem with a lot of 'high end' audio. Here we have a playstation that costs £20 fitted into a thick alloy box that makes it look like a couple of grand! Sadly, lots of people fall for the marketing and are pulled in by the thick shiny metal, despite there being almost the same stuff inside as a cheap 'budget' machine. I must say also, the sound on that youtube video is by far the best quality I have heard on that site.

Check out one of his other versions too!...

trSXnioLh3c

[BTH K10A]

See this illustrates precisely my problem with a lot of 'high end' audio. Here we have a playstation that costs £20 fitted into a thick alloy box that makes it look like a couple of grand! Sadly, lots of people fall for the marketing and are pulled in by the thick shiny metal, despite there being almost the same stuff inside as a cheap 'budget' machine. I must say also, the sound on that youtube video is by far the best quality I have heard on that site.

Check out one of his other versions too!...



Seems he sold that one on ebay. Auction showcases a lot of his other work too. :)

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/High-End-Sony-Playstation-SCPH-1002-LCD-and-buttons-/250847233101#ht_9972wt_1141

[Wakefield Turntables]

Yep I intend to produce something similar but my DIY skills are not as good as some of the examples on the net! I'm just going through the various mods and when time permits, bolting them onto my ps1. :cool:

[Folkboy]

Works of flippin' art!

[john blackburn]

Hi REXTON

I thought the linear power supply made the most noticeable difference to mine.

I also went with adding a pair of new phono connectors and cutting the traces from the dac. There is a tiny muting thingybob in the signal path that is damn near impossible to remove without smd type heated tweezers.

Bypassing it altogether is the easiest solution, unless you have better eyes than me. Mick F's photos make things look much bigger than they really are on the board, the caps you remove after the dac are barely the size of a match head.

If you use an external power supply, remove the "reset" button and this will give you a handy place to feed your power supply cable to. You can mount the second regulator stage where the switch mode supply used to live and keep it very close to the board.

http://i703.photobucket.com/albums/ww35/Jblackburn_photos/DSCF0008.jpg

The £10 price sticker still makes me smile!

John

[Puffin]

John. You do know that the remote control for the PS2 works for the 1 as well. Normally about £4.99 on ebay :)

[Wakefield Turntables]

Hi REXTON

I thought the linear power supply made the most noticeable difference to mine.

I also went with adding a pair of new phono connectors and cutting the traces from the dac. There is a tiny muting thingybob in the signal path that is damn near impossible to remove without smd type heated tweezers.

Bypassing it altogether is the easiest solution, unless you have better eyes than me. Mick F's photos make things look much bigger than they really are on the board, the caps you remove after the dac are barely the size of a match head.

If you use an external power supply, remove the "reset" button and this will give you a handy place to feed your power supply cable to. You can mount the second regulator stage where the switch mode supply used to live and keep it very close to the board.

http://i703.photobucket.com/albums/ww35/Jblackburn_photos/DSCF0008.jpg

The £10 price sticker still makes me smile!

John

Love what you've done so far with your PS1,I've got and bought some goodies from Maplins today, including a new soldering iron so i can get to some of SMT components. I'll be bypassing the DAC and including some new gold plated (or maybe silver plated) RCA's at some point. It sounds like you have gone a couple of steps further than I intended by adding a different types of power supply. i must admit that I'm a complete newbie to modding CD's so I've bought a couple of books to get my head around circuit diagrams. It's been 20+ years since I did basic electronics at school so I need a refresher :cool: Can you post some pictures of your power supply?? Also could I be really cheeky and ask for your help If I get stuck adding the power supply. It looks simple enough to do. I'll start by seperating the original PS power supply and then have a go at installing the linear power supply. Are you still tinkering with yours???

PS mine cost a tenner as well :eyebrows:

[john blackburn]

Hi REXTON.

If you have any questions give me a yell.

Mine is as per the MickF modifications http://dogbreath.de/PS1/index.html

It hasn't done much work recently as the room it lives in has been subject to a load of building work. I will be over your neck of the woods soonish to see my folks (I'm a West Yorkshire bloke living away these days) If we can sort a suitable evening out I will slide by for a natter if you fancy.

Hi Puffin.
It sits just far enough away that the cable will reach nicely to my chair of happiness. It adds to the "not worth nicking" appearance too.

John

[magiccarpetride]

HI!

Has anyone tried pimping one of these babies yet?? I'm just in the process of stripping out the main PCB of excessive caps in the RCA output path, and installing a remote contol!! This is one hell of a way to start to learn how your CD player works and feeding my addictive habit of tweeking! Next few days I'll be raiding Maplins for power supply cases, next tweek will be to seperate the power supply into seperate case just like my 1210!

Andy

I find PS3 to be unacceptably noisy for any serious listening (the box with its noisy fan is emanating certain high-pitched sounds that truly ruin the listening session).

[Wakefield Turntables]

Hi REXTON.

If you have any questions give me a yell.

Mine is as per the MickF modifications http://dogbreath.de/PS1/index.html

It hasn't done much work recently as the room it lives in has been subject to a load of building work. I will be over your neck of the woods soonish to see my folks (I'm a West Yorkshire bloke living away these days) If we can sort a suitable evening out I will slide by for a natter if you fancy.

Hi Puffin.
It sits just far enough away that the cable will reach nicely to my chair of happiness. It adds to the "not worth nicking" appearance too.

John

John,

Sorry for taking a while to get back to this thread. Thanks for the offer of coming over I may just take you up on that at some point :) The only I've done so far is to add some spikes to it for some isolation. I think that I may have a go at removing the 6 caps which control the RCA output. Then I'll probably add the remote control mod as this look quite simple. I dont know if you've done the remote control mod but did you strip the PCB (the one with the memory and joypad slots down to its bear component minimum?? I've seen a couple of pictures where someone has done this. Secondly did you recap your power supply, change the fuse at all??

Andy

[Wakefield Turntables]

I find PS3 to be unacceptably noisy for any serious listening (the box with its noisy fan is emanating certain high-pitched sounds that truly ruin the listening session).


The original PS1 is something of an unknown quantity until you start tweeking it. I've not seen any threads where the PS3 is a dedicated CD player. Have a look round the net there are many people that have modified the PS1 with some very weird and wonderful iterations :eek:

[hornucopia]

I use a nicely modded PS1 I got from a German hi-fi fan. Can't tell you all the details, as it's in german, of course!
But there are extra caps sticking off the top (like mini skyscrapers?) and detail changes internally, plus a remote of course. Lovely paint job too.
I don't play CDs that much now, but it doesn't sound bad at all! Had a seriously modded Marantz CD 80 and a Shanling CD-120 prior.

[Folkboy]

That looks very cool indeed, even moreso with the contrasting paintwork.

[john blackburn]

Hi REXTON

I left the controller board alone as I use the handset to control it. You have play, stop, next, last and pause available through the handset buttons so I never saw the need for a remote or screen with mine.

The spikes could work against you as there isn't much weight in the stock playstation so the weight of a long interconnect can be enough to drag or tip it. I have mine on pair of bamboo worktop blocks using sticky rubber feet to couple it to the top block and a layer of soft rubber between the blocks to give some vibration damping.

I mounted the original smps remotely to start with before replacing it with MickF's linear design for the "finished" version. Not that anything I build gets properly finished, my last amp build is still screwed to a wooden board it went onto "just for testing" over a year ago.

John

[Wakefield Turntables]

Hi REXTON

I left the controller board alone as I use the handset to control it. You have play, stop, next, last and pause available through the handset buttons so I never saw the need for a remote or screen with mine.

The spikes could work against you as there isn't much weight in the stock playstation so the weight of a long interconnect can be enough to drag or tip it. I have mine on pair of bamboo worktop blocks using sticky rubber feet to couple it to the top block and a layer of soft rubber between the blocks to give some vibration damping.

I mounted the original smps remotely to start with before replacing it with MickF's linear design for the "finished" version. Not that anything I build gets properly finished, my last amp build is still screwed to a wooden board it went onto "just for testing" over a year ago.

John
John,

Thanks for the tip regarding extra weight. This project really is a cheap and cheerful experiment to see how cheaply I can mod a CD player! My isolation will comprise of a granite chopping board approx 15mm thick bought from some cheapo kitchen store for about £9, and then I'll be attaching 5mm of sorbothane under the entire surface area of the underside of the granite. This will complete my 1st round of mods, the extrinsic dampening! Second round of mods will be to remove excessive components to the rear of the PS1 PCB i.e. all the expansion ports except for the RCA's, these will be rehoused off the PCB probably in the back of the PS case and they'll be replaced with gold plated versions which will probably come from Maplins. I've just won a PS2 remote control and sensor off eBay for £4.50 so when this arrives I'll be modding the joypad PCB!

ps total spend so far is about £30.

[Wakefield Turntables]

Tonight got rid of the stupid reset switch on the playstation case, I'll be keeping the case as it keep the cost of the project down and i like the design of the top loading drawer the playstation has. I slightly modified the power pack today by removing the IEC and hardwiring a decent quality mains cable to the power supply. Cant do anything now until the remote control arrives which will be internally installed so i dont have to use the silly joypad to get the cd working! :cool:

[southall-1998]

I know this thread is a little old, LOL!

I have a Sega Dreamcast locked away in my wardrobe. I wonder if the Dreamcast would make a nice CD player? Maybe that guy could mod it for me :) Might ask him, but he might refuse :(

Regards.