This page here gives some examples of laserdisc problems, including possibly the worst crosstalk I've ever seen!

http://www.pulsingcinema.com/feature/laserrot/

That is pretty ugly. Crosstalk usually looks like the above pictures but to a lesser degree and I find it easier to spot on lighter colored solid areas of the picture like a shot that includes a lot of the sky.

What potmeters did you mess with? Not the tilt I imagine?
You adjusted what?

Pretty much all later Pioneer models have boards structured like this one. At the very least, the CLD-Dx03 models or later. For getting started with amateur LD player tuning, they're much much easier than earlier models.

i have a disc that is this bad, but this is beyond crosstalk, this has nothign to do with the player, this
is a flaw on the disc itself.

the disc i have will show this only on the last 8-12 minutes but on both sides.
the disc is flat so its not a warped issue, just a flaw
shows on both of my players at the same spots.

and the disc i have is the only one that had this issue with over 800 discs going through my hands over the years since 1989.

i only noticed crosstalk when playing on certain players, but the R7G is very good at not showing crosstalk, i've never seen
it since owning the player.

glad you fixed it i hope you didn't tweek too much to mess anything up without a scope or anything
to see what you were doing.

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I've also read that adjusting the focus can sometimes help with disc scratches.

i don't know about that.
if your 5 dollar disc is scratched and your 700 player needs to be tweeked to play said disc you should figure out another way to do it.

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kris, i decided to start with the tilt and move on to a combination of that and the focus if that didn't work alone, but the tilt worked. (to control beam angle, not a mechanical tilt).

gumpyandpals, yeah, i know what you mean! i was expecting it to be a weekend project and likely take forever and maybe leave me worse than i began. i only opened the case to take photos to compare to the service manuals before diving in, but once i saw everything labeled and simple i had to tinker.

the pots were virtually frictionless to turn. if the jostling during shipping it to me didn't misalign the laser then it might very well have turned the pots.

It actually DOES control the mechanical aspect. When you adjusted the pot you should have noted the mechanics tilt back and forth. It doesn't do anything electrical to the optics...

thanks, i was actually unsure about that point but just wanted to type quickly.

it worked though, phew!

A lot of it, I suspect, is component drift over time, capacitors weakening and thus. Pioneer did a good job designing for that, though - otherwise there would be a much higher failure rate than we're seeing...

component drift are you saying that the trim pots moved over time


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Fact is a lot of players left the factory with the alignment not "spot on". I did a lot of warranty repairs that didn't require parts, just a proper alignment

I spent the day watching movies, and the verdict is: problem solved! 4 discs now watched and zero crosstalk.

Next, I'll have to kick my wife out of the movie room. She needs the subtitles, but because they disappear on widescreen LDs when I change the projector aspect to the movie's, we had to watch them in 4:3 mode, quite small. Though I actually like that most of the LDs seem to keep the subtitles away from the film area.

This page here gives some examples of laserdisc problems, including possibly the worst crosstalk I've ever seen!

http://www.pulsingcinema.com/feature/laserrot/



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I have two discs that show this type of crosstalk.one is Soldier the crosstalk starts about 10 minutes at the end of side A side B plays perfectly. The other is Payback. Its the main reason I've never really committed to the format and will probably be the reason why i end up throwing my collection away.Mpeg blocking has nothing on crosstalk it drives me nuts.

No doubt about this i bought my first player around 20 years ago brand new it had so many faults i welcomed DVD with open arms and never watched another laserdisc for about 12 years.

I've still yet to ever actually see crosstalk in action. I've only seen pictures illustrating the problem.

i didn't even know what this actually was for about 10 years.
even then i just thought minor crosstalk was a flaw in the disc not with playback.
but then again it really is, it only happens on CLV not CAV anyway.

so if the player is not aligned right and you have a poorly mastered disc with groves too close and the laser is reading over onto the other
track you will see it.
i was running 3 players but now 2 and have yet to see it on my lesser model players.
lesser only that they are not expensive, but still play movies and that's all i really care about


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Speaking as someone who has been involved with LaserDisc since the beginning, crosstalk has always been a b**ch and I can't stand it. on the top loading Helium-Neon laser players they had no tilt circuits so a CLV disc had to be perfectly flat, perfectly mastered/pressed and your player perfectly aligned for no crosstalk to be seen. In fact, Pioneer didm;t consider crosstalk a defect and would routinely return 'defective' cross talking discs to dealers as not defective. The late Ken Winslow did an article in Video Magazine about crosstalk and how it was often a player problem but that the majority of Pioneer Authorized service centers didn't have the equipment to properly adjust a player for no crosstalk and he recommended that players only be sent to Pioneers LA service center - I think it was on Rosecrans Ave. Pioneer got so mad they pulled their ads for a few issues.

the CAA format was developed to help reduce crosstalk - and it does - then the solid state laser based LD-700 came out and had a tilt servo to deal with warped discs - the reality is, with the solid state 780nm infrared laser beam, a tilt servo is required since the beam is larger than the 628nm He-Ne laser - and while a CAV disc has tracks that have a pitch of 1.66um, CLV discs have tracks that are 1.5um and can vary down to 1.4um for very long discs - shorter discs, like CAA-45 can have 1.66um tracks and CAV can have tracks that go up to 1.8um which is often used on discs with lots of still frames to avoid any track interference - its not crosstalk because CLV crosstalk is the vertical and horizontal interval being read from the tracks in front of and behind the current track - since CAV has a "locked" track rate the intervals are always in the same place and CAV can NEVER have crosstalk (it can have beats from audio carriers, EFM or color sub carrier getting into the video due to poor mastering or a poor player).

Before I got my CLD-1010 I bought only CAV titles whenever possible to avoid crosstalk - plus they have better frequency response and higher S/N in the luma and chroma compared to a CLV title,so they plain look better. When I bought my LD-W1 i was disappointed to find that it cross talked right from the factory - Pioneer was really sloppy in aligning players - but companies like Sony were worse. The Philips CDV-488 was/is an excellent player when it comes to crosstalk - I've not heard of one with the problem. The Pioneer Elite CLD-95 had real problems with crosstalk and the CLD-97 was its replacement.

Sorry to run long but crosstalk is the biggest problem LaserDisc had, and Pioneer never really fixed it.

By chance does the CLD-97 have easy-to-access tilt adjustments? I have a McIntosh MLD-7020 I'm sending to Kurtis for alignment and another Pioneer CLD-97 coming and if it has crosstalk I won't have the money to send it so will have to try to adjust it myself - I have the 8-inch Pioneer test disc for crosstalk adjustment and if the 97 has adjustment pots like the R7G I could try to adjust it myself. So if anyone has any info, please pass it along.

I also own an R7G and while it performs perfectly, its nice to know its easy to adjust. The LD-S2 I have coming I doubt is easily adjustable so I'm praying it plays fine. Not that i should care since I have an XO that works great both for NTSC discs and for my MUSE titles - but tho LaserDisc sickness has got me and I have an LD-S9 coming too - and i own 3 Runco's - I had 4 but gave one away and I also bough a low-end AC-3 equipped Panasonic, the 680, and am floored by how well it performs. It had about 80% of the quality as the ultra high-end players. I'm giving one of my AC-3 equipped LX-900's away too.