I've got a Pioneer cld-v2600 that plays pretty great. Only problem I've noticed is once in a while the voices sound noticeably deeper than they should. As if someone had a pitch shifter and turned the knob down just a half notch.
Most of the time its not even noticable, but I'd still love to understand the cause.
I'm also looking for an external equalizer with pitch adjust on it. I could just hook that up the the tv and turn the pitch up a hair. That would definitely fix any problem with pitch.

This this the P/S Star Wars????

If you have too much bass...which is what it sounds like you are saying...then yeah an equalizer would help or just tone controls if your TV has them.

To be clear though, an equalizer doesn’t change any pitches, it just lets you make certain frequencies louder or quieter. For example, if a man is singing a C note and you push all the lower frequencies up on your equalizer or turn the Bass knob up you will bring more bass out of his voice but he’ll still be singing the same C note at 261.6 Hz, the pitch doesn’t change.

A LD player is unlikely to spin slower and produce lower pitches, especially from the digital soundtracks. So I’m pretty sure the problem is being described incorrectly in some way.

Sorry to explain it this way. It’s hard to know how to talk to people with one post count until we know more about them and their experience with home theater, etc.

If I had to take a guess...and I’m certainly not very sure of this, I would say your TV is probably pretty low end or at least the sound is and while it may have been fine for cable TV, Laserdisc players produce pretty full range dynamic sound by comparison. Perhaps your speaker is being overdriven for the first time in its life and it hates it?

What exactly is your setup? Can you hook a CD player to the same TV and see if you get the same sort of problem?

I was a recording engineer and music producer for nearly 20 years, so I do know what I'm talking about as far as audio goes. I'm just not well versed in the working of laserdisc players, as this is the only working one I've owned.
But I can guarantee with 100% certainty, this is not an issue with bass. I'm saying the pitch is dropped. When a woman sounds like a man, that has nothing to do with the EQ. Which is why I was hoping to find an EQ with a pitch shifter.

It's definitely the laserdisc player, as this is noticeable on all discs if you listen closely. But it is much more noticeable on the older discs (pre-1990), and it doesn't happen when playing any other media through my tv or soundbar. Only with my laserdisc player. So no, the problem is not being "described incorrectly". Which I might add, is pretty rude to assume.

Well I hope this helps you a little.
LD plays the disc, its not like an LP Vinyl or audio tape where you can adjust the speed to get difference in pitch or audio.
So if you get image and audio is messed up it sounds like the disc not the player as the LD players can't do such unless you
can on a Karaoke player?

What is the disc?

It happens here all the time. People of different nationalities and expertise levels have a hard time describing the issues they have. You can take offense to what I’m saying or not but my goal is to further communication. Misunderstandings are common.

It’s very hard for an LD player to pitch down, this is why I assumed you were using incorrect language.

So if that is happening...this is complicated. The V2600 looks like a pretty basic non-karaoke model so it doesn’t have any ability to change the pitch on purpose. If the LD slows down the audio will slow down but also you’ll lose video since that has to be standard in frequency. There is no memory to speak of in the digital audio section so stretching the sound is genuinely impossible there except for maybe some sort of BB delay type of effect from falling caps.

Can you make a recording of the phenomenon? Also, are you listening to the Digital or analog sound tracks when this happens? (To clarify, please don’t be offended again, LDs made after a certain year usually have two stereo soundtracks, one analog and one Digital. This is separate from which outputs on the back of the player you are using. The RCA jacks can output either stereo soundtrack, you select on the remote. This confuses people a lot so that’s why I mention it, not to make you feel stupid or anything).

It would also be nice to see a video of the LD players clock versus a known accurate clock.

I don’t see how the pitch can be lower without the disc playing slower and I don’t see how that can happen so this is not an easy question.

Unfortunately, I dont have the ability to get a video of the problem, other than with my phone, and the quality would be too poor.
This is happening with analog and digital, regardless of the connection used. And as I mentioned before, it happens with all discs. It seems more noticeable on the older discs, but that detail could be coincidental. I only own about 20 movies on LD at this point.

I doubt I addressed everything, but I'm sick and in bed, typing this on my phone. Lol doing my best.

I appreciate everyone's input! This is a difficult hobby as far as finding folks who know what they're talking about. I had to search for a good while to find this board.


I think the idea of clocking the timer is super clever. I'm going to try and do that. Not knowing enough about how the players operate, this idea never occurred to me.
Then again, if it shouldn't be able to occur without the video going out, I dunno.

In all my years of audio work, I've never even heard of anything remotely like this.

A time-compressed movie through speeding up would sound higher, not lower.

Yeah I was wrong on that but now I want to see how this one plays out.

You don’t have to capture the video necessarily, the audio would get the point across.

Wild guess: electrical overload = voltage drop on a very minute level.

I've heard this streaming, if that makes any difference.

Why is nobody pointing out that LD can't play if its not up to speed.

While these do look like records they can not be played backwards or at different speeds without some type of external device.

Players won't do this.

It might be your sound, have you tried the player on another sound setup to see if it's the same ?

Also there is the possibility that there is nothing wrong, it's just that, if you are used to see movies on "streaming" sites, I know some have the movies accelerated (or decelerated) a little so it has a lesser chance to be picked up by bots as copyrighted content (cause sound isn't the same, length is different from the comparison source, etc...), and you are just not used to hear the correct voice pitch. I know I had this problem on the Die Hard movies, never watched them before watching a few years ago on a streaming site, then I got my first hard copy (LD) and I noticed a difference.

I believe both you and I did point this out. If the pitch is low then some kind of delay in the analog section is the only thing I can conceive of causing it and even that is theory and it would be randomly variable, not constant.

The disc can’t be slowed down by more than the teeniest fraction and still generate NTSC video so the lower pitch can’t come from that.

Knowing for sure if we’re talking about the Digital or analog soundtracks is necessary. Perhaps a defective DAC could cause this but I’ve never heard of it before.

I hope we hear audio of this because I’m very curious.

I have been in the hospital since my last post. I am hoping to be able to get some audio of this later today after I get some sleep and go see the doctor for my follow up.

Though I dunno what anyone expects to hear beyond what I've explained. I 100% know what I'm saying when I say the audio is pitched lower than it's supposed to be. Not the tone, the bass, or anything that has to do with the EQ whatsoever. And the voices don't sound slower. Just deeper (like Andre The Giant).
And it doesn't make any difference whether it's the analog or digital track. They both have the same problem, so I doubt that's it.

I'm trying to be succinct here, so if I sound rude or short with anyone, please know that's not the case. I really appreciate the hell out of anyone willing to chime in.

I have tested this on two different systems and nothing is different. It's 100% the laserdisc player. I just don't have any idea why.


The most frustrating part of this whole thing is the long story that I lived through just to get a working laserdisc player. Short version is: shipped one from Idaho for $50 that didnt work, put it in the shop, trying for a whole year to fix it before they asked if they could just find me a working player instead because the other one couldn't be repaired.
Now here I am. Just wishing I would have ended up with a different player. I doubt I'll be able to buy another one for years, if ever. Disabled and no income make it difficult to enjoy all my childhood media formats.

Well, we thought the point of this post was to try and determine the cause of the issue. Since it’s something I’ve never seen or heard on any LD or CD player I’m interested. I’m not asking for the audio demonstration for any other reason than to try and determine the cause. I can’t fix it over the internet but maybe we can diagnose it.

Best of luck on your recovery. Hopefully you’ll soon be able to get back to LD BS when the important stuff is done.

Of course. The point is most definitely to figure out/understand the problem.
If I said something to make you think otherwise, I'm sorry. I dunno what I could've said.

Thanks for the well wishes. I'm just going to try and get through the day so I can get home and record a sample of this issue. I only hope my phone will record in a high enough quality to hear it.

Please try to record it to something via line level output. I guess we’d get the basic idea with any method but to really understand the sound the highest quality is preferred.

I understood you 100% from the outset.
How about describing the amount of pitch shift (Mandy Patinkin to Andre the Giant, or Wally Shawn to Andre the Giant?), and how often it happens.

This is still tied to my original wild guess, but how about describing your power conditioning?

He said it makes a woman’s voice sound like a man, so about one octave I guess.

It’s easy to understand what he’s saying but it’s much harder to imagine how it could physically take place.

To make a sound wave drop in tonal frequency but not slow down is honestly a bit of a technical achievement. It’s hard to do well on purpose and was genuinely impossible in real time until Protools without massive spooky artifacting so I’m assuming it must warble somewhat like Hawkwind performing something Michael Moorcock wrote or someone playing with the Time knob on a delay pedal.

The other possibility is a massively confused DAC but not if analog tracks see the same thing. There are only so many areas in the player where Digital and analog soundtracks are susceptible to the same things, basically just the line level amp.