Hello,
Have a CLD959 (CLD97) that I brought in a while ago, and want to try and get it going. It has two main problems.
1. When you turn on the power at the wall the player begins to spin up, this is before the player is switched on! When switched on it spins down.

It will accept a disc, then the laser will move, but not spin up at this point.

2. so as it will not spin up, and cannot see a beam from the laser, maybe the laser is dead.

I have cleaned the lens, but to no avail.

I had a electronics shop look at it and he said the PSU was fine, and thought it was a chip gone on the board attached to the face, with all the control buttons. I have a CLD98 which I know works, which I swapped out the face , and tried. This stopped the spin up while off, but still the player would not play, CD nor LD.

What other cheaper players used the same PICK UP , and any ideas on where to look on the control (buttons) board for the fault that allows power to go to the spindle, before turning on the player?

You would have to get a front board from a 97/97/939/959, no other boards would work. I probably have a 97 board but the shipping would be very expensive.

As for the not playing if it is the pickup you can add the CLD-2080 and CLD-3080 to the list of players with the same pickup. If it is not the laser then maybe someday I'll have time to debug where this problem is located in the electronics. This is a common issue in the 97 with age.

Is the issue the chip on the board? Or something else? Do you think it would be worth swapping out the chip from the cld98, as the only thing that seems to have been changed on the cld98 seems to be the PSU, which is switchable between differnt voltages.

Would it be worth turning up the RF gain, is this likely to make any difference to it being able to read or not, if the laser is on its way out?

I have not had time to debug the issue of not playing. Put it into test mode and see if you get some kind of picture.