Has anyone made a CD player?

[The Black Adder]

Hello ladies & gents

I've been debating which classic cd player I should get but a thought did occur to me, what if I could or get someone to make one?

To be honest I think getting someone to make one is probably the best idea as I have no testing kit or anything.

Has anyone actually made a cd player here? My choice of main components for my cd player has the following:

CDM1 or simular transport/laser
TDA1541A - Dual or a single S1 dac - NOS modded
External DAC/PSU (possibly)
Casework is unknown.

Obviously these parts would need to be parted from other cdp's

Anyone got any thoughts?
Cheers
Joe

[The Grand Wazoo]

Ask Erik (http://theartofsound.net/forum/showthread.php?t=11349)

[The Black Adder]

Holy saxons mother's son... He's God like indeed. Alas I fear the cost for him to make me one will go stratospheric but will ask.

Cheers Chris, I had not seen that thread.

[Puffin]

Have a look at the Shigaclone thread on Diyaudio. I made one and it was not bad at all. I then fiddled with it and killed it:(

Trouble is you can't get the donor JVC boomboxes any more (£25). They had the same mechanism as the Shigaraki Flatfish transport that sold for an awful lot of money. There is a thread where there was going to be a group buy of newly made mechs to the same spec as the JVC. Bit boggling though with all the input from those that appear to have the knowledge as to what components/configuration it should be etc.

http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/digital-source/120229-finally-affordable-cd-transport-shigaclone-story.html

[Stratmangler]

http://www.tentlabs.com/Products/diycd/index.html
http://www.theaudioeagle.com/columns/column07.html
http://www.akustik-perfekt.homepage.t-online.de/the-audio-collection/

[nat8808]

When you say build one, what do you mean?

If you have the mech in mind then it will need a controller board and bit that recovers the datat, so might as well use one that normally goes with it rather than build from scratch. Then the data either goes off to a DAC chip via say I2S or gets converted to s/pdif and to a socket.

So... are you really meaning has anyone taken the inner workings of a CD player and put them in their own case? Or do you really mean built the whole thing from scratch?

Most DIY people will be doing the former but with perhaps a few tweaks AFTER it is already up and running in basic form - i.e just the case has been removed - and make it into a top-loader to save engineering a tray.

I'd suggest just picking an old CD player that perhaps has smaller circuit boards or modular ones at least and get it all to work stuck on a plank of wood.

Problem with some mechs like the CDM1 is a lack of readily available puck to use it in a top loader form. Can make one of course. Some of the CD players that use it will have large circuit boards with everything on it so you'll end up needing to make an equally large case to house it!

CDM9 is good though as there are many Naim pucks that work with it. There's an Apple CD-ROM product from the 90s that uses a CDM9. It's small and portable, has a remote and should be easy to put in your own case like the Shigaclone things - just needs a puck. Normally they are about £10 on eBay and even has SCSI out so great for ripping CDs (if you have a SCSI interface on a PC). Then you just need to find the chip that has an s/pdif output on it and run a wire from that to an RCA socket.

The Lampizator site is good for seeing how CD players can be butchered and digital outputs taken directly from chip pins.

If you look inside a CEC TL2 for example, it is just modular Sanyo CD player parts in a hefty case with the mech modified to use a belt..

In a random magazine I found at my parents', there was a circuit for making your own laser power supply board that can be used in CD players - a mid 80s electronics mag. Could be interesting, especially as the laser psu going down is normally the cause for people thinking the laser is dead.

[The Black Adder]

Cheers guys.

Lots of info, many thanks. I don't know at the moment, I guess re-boxing an older cdp is probably what I'm wanting to do as I could probably do that myself.

It does sound the easy way (he says)... lol

I guess it's getting a case together.