Hey guys,

No, I didn't disappear. My LD hobby has been dormant lately because of lack of time and the fact my TV still does a horrible job with widescreen discs. I've been watching full screen transfers though.

Anyway, the fall gathering for the "locals" on the audio forum I practically live on is coming up; and among the list of stuff people are bringing is a CLD-59 Elite.

I know the Elite players tended to have better picture quality than non-Elite units; and I know there are some feature differences between it and the CLD-99 Elite (gamma vs epsilon mechanisms). So how much better is this going to be than my CLD-D505; and how inferior of picture quality will it be say to the 99?

My biggest dilemma is; I don't really search players out on eBay looking to upgrade; the D505 is working fine for me; I also don't like to pass up opportunities.

So, some advice? Should I forego buying any more audio gear (and I *really* love my audio gear) and, depending what the guy is asking for it, jump on it? Or is the improvement I'm going to see not drastic enough for me to worry with. And what's a "really good steal" price for this unit?

Thanks,
-Jay

glad to hear that you still have LDs, last i remember you were thinking of getting rid of them.

anyway i don't know about the CLD-59 compared to the one you have.
one sold on ebay for 160 and there is a sort of working one on ebay now for 100
so if you can get it for less than those prices i would as long as it works.
then you can decide for yourself with your setup.

and if you don't like it i'm sure you can always sell it on ebay or here and get all of what you paid,
if not more

Duncan or Kurtis would know best what it's comparable too picture quality wise, and what the internal mechanics it's closest too.

Mechanically it's going to be the same as the 505. Visually it's going to be about the same. Advantage? You get a digital output with the 59

Thanks. That's exactly what I wanted to know.

I'm not sure how much digital output would be worth to me. I've done a couple of DVD transfers; and the digital output is rather noisy. And by noisy, I mean like an old internal sound card pulsing noise when you moved the mouse or the hard drive accessed, noisy. I haven't cracked it open to see if there's anything I can do about it; aside turn the attenuation off and use a passive preamp to drop the signal a bit; pushing the noise a bit lower. I can also run digital noise reduction and get rid of it pretty efficiently. On the other hand; spdif would allow me to capture a PCM stream directly; avoiding all that mess. Analog tracks, aside from ones that aren't CX encoded and naturally a bit noisy; are fine. Muxing that with a video capture could be somewhat difficult; I don't know how accurately timed everything would be.

So, I'm not going to put a lot of effort towards it. Which leaves more money for either audio gear, or LDs.



Haha. I tend to rant and rave when things blow up in my face. I say a lot of things in foul moods that never get followed through on. No, all the discs are on the shelves; I've watched a number of pan-and-scan discs. Right now it's an occasional thing; when everyone leaves I hook the thing up to the 70" Sharp; which has outstanding scaling. The biggest pain was getting the cables plugged in. It's wall mounted; it's heavy, they're in awkward spots.

No, I still have them. I waited 20 years to get my hands on some; I can't throw them out.