Pioneer LaserDisc / DVD thread - Page 2

Two choices as I see it.

1) Get some "Goo Gone" and see if it will remove the residue - although it may take the silver coating with it. (Don't use anything other than Goo Gone or it might attack the plastic)

2) Put the black tape back on and don't look at the feet. That's probably why the tape was put on in the first place.

I own a CLD-D703, and I never noticed the silver finish on the front and back feet before you mentioned it. All my other equipment has black feet. Silver or black, the feet are kind of hard to see.

Remove the feet, then try some WD-40 and your fingernail on the goo and see if it cleans up. What do you have to lose?

I emailed Duncan Hunter at laserdisc service and he has two big silver front cld-97 feet in great condition that I just purchased.

Boy, that Duncan is a great guy!

So, thanks to Duncan for the feet and Kurtis for doing the mod's and boxing it up for me. It sure is nice to have two LD experts still repairing these players. That both of them are great guy's is just icing on the cake

Now my search begins for the first LD player I owned from back in 1988.

Interesting, I noticed the tape on the feet but didn't really give it a second thought. If I'd know I would have swapped them with others from another unit of mine.

The seller stated that he is not obligated to pay for the replacement feet. If anyone could see the player with that hard yellow residue they would say that the player is not in like new condition. I purchased a player on ebay a couple of weeks ago from a guy on ebay that arrived not working. He refunded my money even before UPS inspected it. Now that is a good seller!

Forty years of experience in the AV industry has shown me that gold on connectors is mostly for show. Gold only has one unique attribute: It doesn't oxidize or tarnish. In fact, a silver connector - even a tarnished one - is a better conductor than gold. I got that piece of info from Bill Low, the founder of Audioquest. To optimize the conductivity of a conventional connector, clean it with isopropyl alcohol - not rubbing alcohol.

In all the newer players mid 80's foward the only thing the transit screw does is hold the turn mechanism in back to the side A position. It does not lock down the pickup as with the original players. Newer players have stops or teeth'd rails to restrict laser movement. The issue is people do not let the unit power down before unplugging and shipping so those ship is play mode and that is where the trouble begins. Always let the display turn OFF and and the red standby lite if it has one come on before unplugging. If you unplug while the display says OFF it can still be in play position.

Kurtis

Why search for and waste money buying an older laserdisc player that may or may not have problems? You already picked up the CLD-97. Even the CLD-97 does not produce a picture as good a decent print on a standard DVD. You could have updated a large part of your movie collection to DVD / bluray for the amount of money that you spent on that player.

Laserdiscs are inferior to DVD and bluray. I bought a CLD-D703 just to playback some out of print / never on DVD laserdiscs. After I transfer and process certain laserdiscs to DVD, I will probably just use the D703 as a CD player.

That's what thappened to my unit. Improper shutdown left the player in the raised play position. With the help of Kurtis on this problem and a few other issues, my unit is now running very well.

Rubbing alcohol usually has a small amount of lanolin (a lubricant), isopropyl doesn't. Not quite sure on denatured, it might be the same thing as isopropyl. I should also have mentioned some other connector cleaner choices, such as Caig DeOxit - designed for cleaning of controls, switches and such but also good for connectors. I've used Tweek and Cramolin in the past, but I don't think they're worth the money. Nothing seems to do as thorough and consistent a job as DeOxit or isopropyl.

Something else to look for on connectors, other than gold, is nickel or rhodium plating. Gold is so expensive that only a thin layer can be applied to the base metal, while the other two can be thicker because they're less expensive. Neither has the tarnishing problems of silver.

EDIT: I looked up "denatured alcohol" - it's essentially isopropyl with chemical additives to make it poisonous - i.e. undrinkable. I'd stick with isopropyl.

Hello all,

I have a CLD-D406 and I am wondering if it worth to try and scale the picture of this unit to be shown on a 1080p projector? I know blowing up the image of a laserdisc is probably not the best thing to do, but I was just curious as to see what the outcome would be. Has anybody tried it with decent results? I would be using an older Extron DDS-402 and would have to get some type of trans-coder to send the composite signal to the VGA input to the 402. Then out of the Extron via Component to the projector. It is also possible to send the signal to my Pioneer VSX-1019AH-K via component and them have the receiver convert it to HDMI and then to the projector. Maybe a lot of converting, but still interested in seeing what the quality would be. Let me know...

Thanks

I don't know about "worth it" depends on your criteria, I guess but people certainly do it. With full NTSC resolution, stable time base, clean chroma, &c, it definitely looks better than VHS on a big projection screen, which I have also seen (ugh).
The equipment setup you describe is not ideal, of course. The D406 is a middle-of-the-road player as far as video quality goes. More importantly, your proposed signal chain is too complicated. Anything you could get to convert the video from the LD player to a VGA format for the Extron scaler, or to component-video format, would itself be doing video processing, & two or more steps of that will lead to problems. Instead, take the composite video output of the LD player & feed it to one of the composite video inputs of your Pioneer receiver. Then, let the Pioneer do the scaling & output HDMI to the projector.

Lunacy,

That is how it is setup now. I directed the image to a 720p tv and it was decent, but we're talking about a 32" LCD vs a 92" soon to be 106" screen. I don't know exactly what chip the Pioneer uses and thought the Extron would do a much better job although it is a lot older. But hey thanks for the advice and feedback.

I also do not know what chip the 1019 uses. The 1020 uses the lower-end chip in the ABT VRS line, but it appears that the 1019 just used either a proprietary or "no name" chipset.
I am getting acceptable results out of my 701 projected on a 120" screen when output via composite and scaled via Reon HQV-VX provided I do not "zoom" a letterboxed disc. Note I say "acceptable"- the quality is close to most of the early, video-master sourced DVDs but inferior to a modern, anamorphic DVD transfer.

One word....NOSTALGIA

I have over 1200 High def movies in my collection so I don't have any titles to update. Buying the 97 won't affect my future movie purchases so no problem there.

Tom

I find it unlikely that the Extron, which is really designed for handling computer video in any case, would do a better job than any modern scaling solution.
Fundamentally, though, your problem is that it will be extremely difficult to find anything to turn the composite video from the LD into RGB for the Extron scaler which is not itself a scaler. Your quality, then, is going to be limited by the first scaler in the chain, which is likely to be rather cheap. The only exception I can think of would the outboard "front end" unit from an old CRT video-data projector, which could decode composite video to RGB without changing the scan rate, but the quality again would be problematic.

It's much better to use only one scaler, even one which isn't top of the line ; whatever is in the Pioneer should be pretty decent at handling an analog composite source, anyway.

I don't understand this mania for transferring LD to DVD. All you are doing is piling MPEG artifacts on top of composite-video artifacts.

I have hundreds of LDs, some of which I could replace with DVDs if I so chose, others of which I could not. A very few of them I could replace with Blu-Ray. That latter I would describe as an upgrade, whereas since most of my LDs are 4:3 ratio, I don't see much point in replacing one standard-definition format with another. In any case, though, I see no point in taking complicated steps to play back my LDs some other way, when I can simply play them back on a LaserDisc player.

I don't feel the need to back up my own collection either, but I've been using a Sony BD recorder to back up a friend's LDs since he doesn't have a decent player. 15mbps h264 seems sufficiently high enough to prevent any compression artifacts to my eyes. The recorder doesn't have a digital audio input and only records in 256kbps ac3, but it's easy enough to record the digital audio with my PC and re-mux to mkv.

Of course, getting a hold of a Sony BD recorder isn't easy outside of Japan. There's probably plenty of PC h264 solutions, although I hear the Hauppauges limit the bitrate for SD signals.

I have a dumb question to ask. When you get an AC-3 mod do the L/R analog outputs no longer work? My cld-97 that recently had this mod only outputs sound from the right speaker only when using the analog L/R outs. Is this normal?

Thanks,
Tom

Catz and Lunacy,

Yeah I think you guys are right. I'll just let the Pioneer continue to do the processing. I know that I will probably get mediocre to say the least pq, but it's good to know that I can still here some good old AC-3 from my trusty SP-99D Thanks again.....

My CLD-D703 has the DD modification board added in, and the L/R analog audio outputs work just fine.

From my picture files. Here is a picture of the add on board that is installed in my CLD-D703. Not too much there.

Yes, but I do not have a large laserdisc collection. As a matter of fact, I never owned a laserdisc player until this year. I also picked up a brand new VP-100 for next to nothing. Between the CLD-D703 and VP-100 I am only out $200 and some small change.

I have only purchased laserdisc movies that were never released on DVD and/or VHS. PT 109 widescreen and Northwest Passage are a few of the laserdiscs that I am talking about.

I capture to my PC, then do video noise reduction, audio enhancement / noise reduction if applicable, edit out commercials if applicable, make a nice motion menu and when needed convert 4 x 3 letterbox to the 16 x 9 format. Later on I intend to do an upscaled / enhanced rendering of the same files, but that requires a faster PC than the one that I own. 40 hours of PC time to upscale a 2 hour video is a bit much. That would be 4 to 5 nights of rendering on my PC. The PC does nothing at night, so perhaps I should not care and let it run while I am asleep.

I have also copied VHS to DVD via the PC, but only as a last resort. I prefer to just buy the DVD new if it is cheap enough. Ebay used also works for me.

Anyhow, compression artifacts are not a large problem if you bit rate at a high enough value. I processed the colorized VHS version of They Died with Their Boots On, and the DVD copy looks and sounds way better than the original!

Botton line is, if the content is available in a better format I will just buy the movie in the new format if I want to own the movie. DVD quality is good enough for most movies since I do not have a projection screen setup.

When playing back an AC-3 encoded LD, you will only get Left (1) channel audio when analog audio is selected. Depending on how the mod was done, this may be output from both jacks, or only from the L/1 (red) jack, & in the latter case, the R/2 (white) jack may output either silence or something resembling white noise. Other than that, the function of the audio line outputs should be unaffected.

Any other behaviour constitutes a fault.

wow thats a very professional looking ac-3 board. I made one myself 15 years ago. whats the pot for?

OK. That means the disk itself has no analog content on the 2nd channel. The 2nd analog channel has the Dolby Digital information encoded on it, so no analog track is possible.


From a web site:

2: What are the specs of a Laser Disc?

A: A Laser Disc has a top resolution of 425 lines (in NTSC) and has both a 2 channel analog and 2 channel digital (16 Bit PCM) audio track. Laser Discs can also carry a DTS soundtrack in place of the PCM track or a Dolby Digital in a place of 1 of the analog channels. A CAV disc is 30 minutes/side and a CLV disc is 60 minutes/side.

I don't know what that pot is for. When I bought my D703 used (2nd owner), the AC-3 board came installed in the player. Nice clean install.

That's the well-known MSB Technology AC3 conversion. IIRC, the pot is a trimmer for carrier level.

MSB built Runco's laserdisc players. They're still in business making DACs and such.