I recently bought a Sony MDP-650 and it won't play about half of the discs I try.

I have PAL, USA & JPN discs in my collection and it will play some of each region and some it won't, so it's not to do with the region.

It's not an intermittent fault either, it will either always play a disc or it never will. A few discs it will only play one side.

Does anyone know why this might be? The discs that it won't play look clean and unscratched like my others, so I don't think it's to do with that.

I have a MDP-600 player. From what I can tell, it is very similar to your player.

As for your player not reading half of your LD's, the MDP-650 is for NTSC LD's. It cannot read PAL format LD's (Someone correct me if I am wrong here) which would explain why it cannot read some of your LD's. The LD's produced in the USA and Japan are NTSC discs and should play on your MDP-650. As for some of the discs only playing on one side, maybe there is only material on one side of the LD?

I hope I have been helpful here.

There's a PAL/NTSC version. I should see the SM to see if it does any of the shenanigans that Pioneer's combo players do...

http://www.laserdiscarchive.co.uk/laser ... p-650d.htm

edit: and the service manual - http://www.laserdiscplaza.fr/notices/So ... %20650.pdf

From a brief look at it the NTSC->RGB processing is crap, but the regular composite signal might not be. So it could be better than most Pioneer PAL/NTSC players, which isn't hard really.

Your problem sounds like a servo issue - tilt/tracking problems maybe?

Yeah, as stated above, it is not a specific region it will not play, it will play some of my PAL discs and some of my NTSC discs. I have the UK version of this player and it is PAL/NTSC compatible.

Would the tilt/tracking only affect the play of certain discs though? It will work perfectly on some and always does.

I can tell when a disc is not going to work because as soon as I press play the player will start making a loud noise and continue to do this for about a minute before giving up completely.

I'm really no good at the technical side of these things, I'd have no idea how to check anything within the player.