Fixing My Sony MP3 Discman
Vložit
- čas přidán 20. 08. 2020
- I bought a Sony D-CJ01 Discman back in 2001 when they were new. In addition to audio CDs, it can play MP3 files burned to a data CD-R or -RW. But after sitting in storage for years, and realizing that batteries were left in it for most of that time, can I get it working again?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Please consider supporting my work on Patreon: / thisdoesnotcompute
Follow me on Twitter and Instagram! @thisdoesnotcomp
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Music by
Lakey Inspired ( / lakeyinspired ) and Epidemic Sound (www.epidemicsound.com). - Věda a technologie
That Utada Hikaru disc. We all know you have Simple and Clean on repeat.
I know this comment is very old, but Passion was the only song on that particular album that was used in Kingdom Hearts
I had one like this, with a couple of cd folders in my bag and my pockets full of batteries.
I'd measure the bias/supply voltages going to the lcd. It could be age/corrosion has drifted some component values so the lcd is biased outside of the working tolerance. How it looked before you opened her up was very reminescent of very low bias voltage.
I'd guess it's this too. I'd hook the unit up to a bench supply and see if it started coming to life between 3 and 3.6V. Being on such low voltage before may have got the liquid crystal stuck, and a bit higher than normal voltage may provide the energy needed to get it going again. Most 3V Sony products are designed to run up to 3.6V, hence that recommendation. I would also run it for a while on the bench supply.
its look like flat flex cable is glued to LCD PCB - its common problem in many devices, other possibility can be zebra strips not connecting LCD glass to LCD PCB
@@vampirwrr Colin beeped out all of the connections, so it's not the same issue as TI calculators where the FFC has a broken connection where it's glued. It could be the zebra stripe, but given the segments all lit with low power in one scene, I'd guess the liquid crystal is stuck due to incorrect bias voltage.
Watching videos of you take and repair electronics is really peaceful, especially with the music choice. Keep up the awesome work Collin, I can't wait to see the next video!
Utada Hikaru. Ah sir you’re a man of culture. :)
I remember buying a MP3 cd player back around 2003. I was looking at I think a 64mb flash based player and decided on the CD player due to it holding 650mb(roughly 10x as much). Back then I was big into Napster and had multiple hard drives full of music. So the thought of only having about 20-25 songs really was not great. But with a CD I could fit most of one full letter of artists on a CD. So a small CD wallet was enough to hold my full collection of around 4000 songs. Really helped on my 30-35 minute bus ride to work every day.
I've had other mp3 players but for audiobooks you cannot beat a portable CD player. Absolute simplicity - no problem getting tracks in order. Put in book, push button, play. Rechargable batteries keep costs way down. And you can't beat CDs for sound.
BRO, just came from the sony xm4 review and at the end of the video just saw this and my maaan, those were IDENTICAL to my dad's ones, big shoutout from him as well
I always watching in Japan HikaruUtada is famous artist in Japan
いつも日本で観ています。 宇多田ヒカルは日本で有名な歌手です
何年過ごしても新曲を期待して心待ちします。
I had one of these back when they were new. Man, what a treat it is to see one even partially working. This unit replaced one that I am struggling to remember, but I jumped at one of the very first portable MP3 CD players and I want to say it was Kanguru or something like that. Anyway, this was awesome.
I also had the Sony CDX-MP70 and CDX-MP80 head units in my cars of the time. Nostalgia is great.
Oh wow! I still own this mp3/cd player to this day and surprisingly it still works!
Hi Colin. Fellow Minnesotan here. I have a spare Sony MP3 Discman from that same time period. Used it on a trip to New Orleans and Panama City, FL for spring break in 2002. I believe it has been stored in my garage in a sealed bin. If I find it, I'll test it first, then I would gladly send it your way.
15:40 A good explanation would also be development costs. It costs more to develop a co-processor or RAM module than to just out-source the chips from another company.
Dude! You are Awesome! Fellow utada fan! Been listening to her since 1997
The Playstation laser/motor module also just sat in place with rubber feet with no screws.
I love these things. They're so nostalgic.
I have the same one and it's great that everything works. I also liked that you gave information about the chips on the circuit board. I learned something because of you. thanks.
This was the first CD/MP3 player I had and it was terrific. It was easy to use, long battery life, had a large (approximately 0.75" x 4") and easy-to-read display, and was only a little larger than the CD itself and not too thick. Its only limitation was that you couldn't fast-forward/rewind MP3 files while playing them (it wasn't issue for me). It's unfortunate that mine died and I wasn't able to get it working again.
The new generation does not understand the struggles of having your CD player skip while you are walking and I immediately how old I sound.
Excellent content and great videos , thanks for sharing i especially loved the one ab0ut Mini Disk and the hystory behind it.
You have a new subscriber.
4:10 Judging from this point alone, I'd say it's a power transfer issue. Something was very clearly not allowing the full charge of the battery to power the display, and my suspicion indicates if it can't power a low-pixel monochrome display, it probably does not have enough power to read the disc properly.
I have the same model, and used a lot during highschool, I used to burn my MP3s into color CDs, they looked great. I can confirm two things: 1. it runs with 1.2V batteries. If I remember well, the diskman also recharge them with the DC adapter. And 2. all the silver color fades to being after years of use. Thanks for the video. You may kind of recover the display function, there is remote control cable with display for this model.
Awesome video! I kept waiting for you to plug some speakers in so we can hear that it play music! Maybe next time.
Nice look at the portable Sony mp3/cd. Still have a similar one myself. An IRiver iMP-250 (AKA RioVolt SP250). Great players for there time. This one does the usual mp3, wma, asf, ogg, aac (8min buffer) on cd-r/cd-rw, Audio CD (3 min buffer) + FM radio, EQ, rechargeable batteries and even a snake game playable using the in-line remote. Purchased brand new back in 2002 and still workiing. So thankfully I haven't had the need to open it up.
I went through quite a lot of portable CD players, from various brands, back in my day, and the Sony ones were always the best, in my experience. My favorite one was probably the D-F20. I don't remember if it had mp3 capability or not, but I do remember the built-in radio got AWESOME reception for some reason!
I had one of these. It turned up at The Good Guys on Van Ness in San Francisco circa 2001. I had been commuting every day to Burlingame on Caltrain with a nice little Aiwa portable CD player, but I was tired of having to tote a little pack of CDs with me. Since I had a CD burner and was already starting to rip stuff to MP3, the ability to play MP3 CDs seemed like a great solution, even if I didn't have that daily train commute anymore. This fairly inexpensive Sony seemed like a great idea.
Honestly though, while the ability to play MP3 CDs was fantastic, I never loved this player. The sound quality I thought was inferior to my old Aiwa - even when playing regular CDs - and I found the controls really cumbersome to use. Needlessly so. The player definitely went for that late '90s - early '2000s transparent plastic form over function. It was also surprisingly bulky, needlessly so. The little dot matrix display was hard to read, although it was better than what was coming on many portable CD players by that point, which had been hard hit by cost cutting.
I ended up not using this as much as I thought I would. When I ended up moving to LA in 2003 and picking up a cheap Toyota Corolla I briefly used it as my car CD player until I replaced the Toyota head unit with a Sony capable of playing MP3 CDs. After that, it lived in a drawer or a box through 4 moves and over a decade before I finally hauled it out again just to fiddle with it.
Like your unit, it had died, behaving erratically with a garbled display. I normally hang onto stuff like this forever, even long after it's dead, but I have to admit that in spite of this being a fairly unique and trailblazing gadget for the time and just what I was looking for when I found it, I didn't have any lingering sentimentality for the thing and chucked it into the ewaste bin at work.
Honestly, electronic gadgets from the mid-'90s onwards seem to be aging much, much faster than stuff from the '70s thru early '90s. I've got 50 year old inexpensive junk from RadioShack that still works just fine, but these post-NAFTA and China WTO gadgets disintegrate within a decade. I'm not surprised it's irreparable.
I had the same kind of experience with a pair of harman/kardon AV receivers. One that I picked up circa '99 lasted about a decade before developing a fault. It sounded great but didn't support HDMI so I decided to just retire it and replace it with their latest model circa 2011, instead of repairing it. That hunk o' junk didn't sound anywhere near as good and didn't even make it thru the warranty period without going nuts, feeding a loud thumping noise to my subwoofer at 3AM one morning. The warranty replacement started to go nutty by 2018 - I replaced it with a Pioneer that's already seen one of its HDMI inputs fried. Let's see how long this lasts.
I had a blue version of this model as a kid and it exhibited the same exact issues.
it could always be used as a source of background music. Put some music on a CD-R that you really like or a CD that you enjoy so much that you wouldn't really want to skip tracks. It's small enough to fit pretty much anywhere anyway
a fantastic video! love these sort of videos, did you ever revisit the cd player and replace the LCD?
While i was in high school my uncle gave me this mp3/cd player it's an awesome piece of a machine
Hi Collin, did you ever consider that the "sponge" connect thingey that connects the LCD to the PCB might be dirty/bad? I've had the same problems with mutiple devices.
I agree zebra strips are a common point of failure.
I see someone with good taste in music there @02:18!
Awesome vid Collin I see you are also a fan of Utada.
I had one of those! very sure it was more or less identical. I used that fantastic mashiene for ages! i did not have the money for an ipod, but this served me well for a looong time! also i had the remote thing aswell, just so many memories =)
I always liked the arrows that point to the screws!
I have that player. I checked if it had batteries inside. It did. They were dead. Put new ones in and works like a charm. I got mine in 2002.
5:15 They put those arrows on the PS3 consoles too.
And the PS4 ;)
And PS2 and PS1
One thing you can try is take out the LCD and clean the zebra strip. Sometimes dirt and debris gets underneath and blocks the signals going to the LCD.
I had 2 mp3 CD players. I still have one of them, my panasonic. It still works. I don't use it much now that I have my phone. I have lots of mp3 playing devices.
Sony was cooperating with Toshiba in semiconductors around the time this was made, the Emotion Engine was at least partially designed by Toshiba and made in a Toshiba fab for instance.
And I'm guessing that they couldn't wave solder that side of the board due to the ICs so they did it by hand instead.
I have the same player. It came with a cable remote control which also has a display. At least you could use this display.
I’m thinking it may be the piece you removed that you didn’t think was important near one of the covers. There is a possibility it was grounding of some type. Just a thought. A very satisfied new subscriber thoroughly enjoying the content.
UTADA HIKARU! ULTRA BLUE!
HELL YEAH! COLIN WITH THE JAMS!
Maybe it was cheaper to use the Toshiba chip than roll their own for this model.
I see players like this at the thrift store on a regular basis, and they are often broken! Thank you for covering this.
Does it let you use a remote from a sony minidisc player?
My cd walkman D-E j620 won't play quiet voices. It just comes out muffled, it still works i can hear bass and music. But no singular voices. Is there anyway to fix this?
I would have put the metal shielding back on player
I spent most of my life as a Sony Main Dealer in Central London. They were generally the best when it came to taking things apart.
Can you please tell me which electric driver kit you are using?
Could that weird white blob on the pcb be grease from the cd mechanism?
i have one but issue of my cd walk man it not have sound from cd but it can play display show track show time when playing but it still not have sound on headphonejack but it have system audio
i try to resolve resoldering on headphone part and another but it still no audio if you have ideas please tell me 😭
OMG. I had this and I loved it so much!
😢El mio solo reproduce los primeros 20 minutos, crees que funcione si lo intento y después se puedan reproducir las demas canciones?
I have several discman with the screen like this, few characters are seen.
I like that the screen is soldered to the pcb.
Nice. I owned a few MP3-CD players before I finally got an iPod around 2007. I went from the Genica MPTrip to the RioVolt SP-250 to the Sony D-NE720. The D-NE720 was a bit of a step backward from the RioVolt insofar as it inserted a second or two of silence in between MP3s, but the sound quality was great, and it is literally impossible to make a smaller CD player. If it means anything to you, I might even be willing to mail you my D-NE720 to feature in a video.
I have 2 D5 sony CD players that I need to fix after I blew the diode after plugging in a reverse polarity transformer does anyone have any tips to fix it because I've never done any Soldering before and I have a spare with a working board and power supply I don't know if I should fix the diode or just swap the whole board
Working for lg I learned one thing it was actually the fault of both u and the player. The screen was starting to go you helped finish it off when you took it apart. See even though you did it with carful hands and the volt tester showed it was good you kinda nocked the screen around witch finished the screen. See what was wrong is under the screen there should be 2 little long strips the same hight and length of the screen. The ink under the then broke out and leaked though the first panel but not though the second panel. What happens if it leaks though panel one is a blank clear screen what happens when it leaks though both panels it becomes a ink grayish mess all over the screen when turned on. When turned back off the ink will go a way till turned on again. It didn't leak far enough through so you got the first one just a blank screen. The reason I know it was part at fault was because the screen was a jumbled up mess. But we're you're fault was was turning it upside down. when taking it apart and it being upside down for so long the ink had time to leak the rest of the way out into panel 1. But panel one was in such good shape it never made it to panel 2. So this is why the blank screen. At this point the only fix is to replace the screen with a new one. Now just because a new may look like it's in perfect shape turn it upside for 1 hour then turn it on if it stops working right that one to has a leak problem. If you need full details on this u can reply back I would be glad to help the best I can.
Oh the nostalgia. This was my first portable mp3 player.
What RTOS would it be running? If it has one.
Have you tried disassembling the lcd from the pcb? Maybe it uses the weird rubber like connector and it just got dirty.. I've fixed some display issues with the same issues you were having just by wiping that connector with a clean rag and alcohol
Omgggg i loved this during the Napster kazza days wow i had it with silver blue ear clip headpgones
I wonder what went wrong with my old boombox cd player it jist literally stopped reading discs.
Those LCDs are often bonded to the PCB with conductive glue, and this can fail over time. You can sometimes get it working again just by running a soldering iron over the joint at a fairly lowish temperature. Not sure how servicable this one is though, it appeared to be a sealed unit.
Maybe there are resistors on the LCD PCB that are blown.
Where'd you get the spudger from?
Did you happen to check if the unit worked via DC power before taking it apart?
I have a 2003 D-NE511, nice device. With Atrac3plus! Pity they don't make pockets big enough for these. :)
I also have a D-NE 920 device. i love sony, but old sony
I had a really nice maroon red colored CD player that I used back in 2002 till 2005 when I finally got an iPod 20gb my senior year of high school. I still have that same growing library of music on my currant iPhone 8 Plus. I finally gave in and got spodify 2 months ago.
I used to have a cd player that looked just like that but it was a Trex CD500 that I got from the Sam Goody's at the mall. I had the coolest CD player on the bus lol
I still have one of this still functioning. But the lcd display wears off. It turns black, but still visible with the help of a flash light. The sound quality is good.
What color of blue are your walls painted? I need to repaint my spare bedroom and that would look good.
While everyone was switching to MP3 players, I went back to using a portable stereo Cassette Tape player. Since I know how to make Audio Compact Cassette Tapes sound Louder Sharper and Cleaner than CD's and especially MP3's, not to mention that Cassette Tapes last a very long time. I just purchased brand new blank Maxell UR 90 Minute Blank Tapes at Fred Meyer, to continue transferring all of my favorite music unto an Audio Compact Cassette Tapes from CD's and MP3's. Long live the Cassette Tapes!
Has one, bought in 2002. As I remember, winding forward and backwards withing a song was sluggish, probably only when playing mp3.
Cool. for battery and capacitors leakage what i use to clean it is white vinegar as it cancels the corrosion and then IPA. Works like a charme.
Seconding the use of vinegar for battery corrosion. IPA kinda cleans it physically, but vinegar cleans it chemically.
Why you didn’t try the DC adapter power source?
It's always the flat cable. Just put more pressure on it or try to resolder it and it will most likely work.
I had this one too. One of the last if not the last ones i had.
It's possible that Toshiba made the laser assembly?
I know this video is a little bit older, but just a heads up - I really like those ultimate lithium batteries from Energizer, but when I use them in my TI 83 calculator, the higher voltage prevents the LCD display from working correctly. You might try some standard Duracell's or some thing that would've had a more consistent voltage from the time period.
I love this walkman, I used the hell out of my for many years, then I jumped on the Creative MP3 players. You need to put that piece of copper that did suffer from corrosion as the PCB looks to have globs of solder that will make contact with that copper. It uses it for grounding. I bet you could get away with using aluminum tape or cutting some soda cans as a replacement.
Hi, this kind of display usealy have a zebra strip tot connect the glas contacts to the PCB contacts. I would remove the LCD huising tot clean the surfaces. And maybe replace the zebra strip.
Normaly you can see if this is the problem by putting presure on the display.
I had this exact same Walkman, except where its clear on yours mine had a blue tint
Good video man, thanks
I couldn't see the back that well so you will have to check your own voltages but a original psp wall charger (5v) or a slim ps1 power cable (7.2v) should fit into that yellow DC jack to power it and bypass the batteries all together.
Try pressing down where the flatflex is glued to the pcb. Quite often the conductive glue doesn't make proper contact and stops things from working. Sometimes heating it with a hot air rework soldering gun and pressing down on it while it cools down can get the glue connecting the ribbon cable to connect up properly again. But I've had a lot of problems with those glued flat flex ribbons. It might be cheap to make, but not reliable.
I'm also trying to fix one of my mp3/cd players. RioVolt SP250, the unit itself works but the inline remote isn't fully functioning. Out of nowhere all the buttons (except Play/Pause) stopped working. No apparent broken wires or connectors but who knows. I've owned it since Christmas of 2001 so it's led a very productive life but I'm not giving up just yet.
I like them , 2 units, 3 remote and a Sony case for 60 . Huge display and watch them spin
El mío a ratos pierde la imagen y vuelve.
Se me hace que es el contacto que debe haber entre el cristal de vidrio del display y la parte metálica o hilos metálicos que mandan la imagen al mismo.
You do realise you had some electrolyte on the end of your black spudger and when you were touching it around the caps it was coming off right? a visible blue glob came off into the hole beside C432
The electrolytic didn’t bond to the contact, that’s corrosion. Very common with battery leaks and a nice problem to have because it’s so easy to fix.
The blue I am guessing is grease from the rails on the laser unit
Or maybe copper sulfate from leaky batteries, or the electrolyte from said batteries reacting with the metal of the battery contacts.
I've seen it in many devices where batteries have leaked.
I had one of this line of Sony products. It was like their last gasp on hanging on to making CD players. I got into it as part of my aversion to the cost of the iPod which I eventually overcame and came to regret all the time wasted trying to find a cheaper alternative. But back to the CD MP3 player, it seemed like a great alternative in theory. More reliable than the cheap flash memory mp3 players at the time and could play my existing library of cds. The problem was that CD-R still had a relatively limited data capacity for MP3s and burning MP3s to CD-R could be cumbersome and time consuming. I think I made only about two MP3 CDs before getting my first iPod.
So about that little memory chip down there, does it store/mirror a file as it's playing from the CD and when it's full it switches playing from the memory chip to save power because reading from the chip consumes quite a lot less power than spinning the CD motor which also makes it invulnerable to movement and shaking because of that?? Just a random thought i could be wrong but it would be a genius in that era if it worked that way.
Yep, pretty much that's what anti-skip/g-protection did
It plays audio CDs like most other players of the time - starts spinning at 2x to fill the buffer, then slows down a little to keep the buffer topped off while playing back audio in real time.
MP3 discs were different. It would read about 30 seconds of audio from the file and then spin down to a stop. When it got toward the end of the buffer it would spin up again and read another 30 seconds or so. So in between reads it was essentially a solid state player, completely skip-proof.
It could also play about 24 hours of audio on one set of batteries, which was really nice. I still have mine, still works, still a nice player - just not much reason to use it anymore.
Great video
Respect for that Hikaru Utada CD.
I had one on these as well pretty nice little thing
2:18 I see you're a man of culture. 😜
Abdul Hussain *UTADA!* 😍
@@IanNewYashaTheFinalAct You can say that again.
Come to think of it, is Colin a Japanophile here? 😜
I'm asking because of the wall painting that he did, and of course, Hikaru Utada
Ultra Blue is an amazing album 😍😍😍
I think that the caps might've got an issue after assembly
Try cleaning the zebra contacts on the lcd and applying pressure to the display.
In my experience, the zebra strips do cause display issues like this . Lightly pressing on the display can make it work temporarily. It may have looked like it was working after the battery change due to static electricity. Swipe your finger across the display and you may see characters briefly appear.
Lasermike thanks for repeating what I just said 👍
jak p you are welcome. It’s a good suggestion and I wanted it to float to the top so he’d see it and give it a try.
Did you press the "Display" button?
I had that back in the early 2000's .
It lasted me up until 2007