help with a D247

enryfox

I have bought for cheap a SONY D-247 which was sold as "working". On arrival it would actually not play any CD and it would struggle to find focus. Sending back the unit was a non-sense as shipping cost equalled the CD player cost so I decided to try to fix it.
It was still factory sealed, nobody had ever took it apart; everything looked fine, no leaks, no bulging caps, all tidy and clean; the calibration procedure, as outlined by the service manual, requires tools I do not have so I went the old way, trial and error with several CD's.
Three regulations are available, tracking balance, tracking gain and focus gain: the first one made tracking worse in both directions so I assumed it was correct as it was. The two gain settings instead magically fixed most of the problems: by turning both 90~100 degrees clockwise (according to the service manual, decreasing the gain) the cd player now reads almost all my CD's, even CD-R mastered 15 years ago.
There are still a couple of CD's which are hard to read, but I found out they can be easily read if the CDP is powered by the power supply instead of two rechargeable's. I checked the voltage as indicated in the Sservice Manual and levels are the same regardless the power source. What is strange is that the SM says voltage should be 3.0 V and in my CDP the level is 3.0 when doing focus search, but as soon as focus is found and normal play starts, level drops to 2.8 V.


Has anyone experience with this line of Discman (D240, D245, D247, ...) ?

I know it is not a valuable CDP but i somehow like it and playing with it trying to fix it is fun !

thanks

kaosun

It might be a laser issue. I guess you have more than one such CD players so you can take a working laser from a confirmed working player and replace the one in your D247 to see whether your D247 comes back to life. Basically you put TG and FG at middle, restore EF and FB to original positions, it should work at least not too bad. Hope this helps.