Hello everyone,
since some days I have a Pioneer LC-V100 Autochanger with a Commander CO-V100 that can handle up to 50 Laserdiscs.
It's a real beast
I am happy I could get the Autochanger running again after replacing the damaged Fuse.
Everything works fine, all Test in the Service Modes of both Devices, Autochanger and Commander work well without any errors.
The only Problem left to solve is, that until now I can only play PAL Laserdiscs, NTSC Laserdisc are rejected when the Autochanger try to play them after loading the disc.
I found out, that when I use the Service Video Out from the Autochanger in Service Mode, the Autochanger loads the NTSC Laserdisc and plays it without any Problems.
Only when I try in normal operation mode, so when the Commander controls the Autochanger, the NTSC Laserdiscs are rejected.
So I looked at the Service Manual of the Commander Unit and went trough the corresponding Tests in the Service Mode of the unit.
There I found the reason for the described behavior with NTSC Laserdiscs.
The so called "Inhibit Switch" for NTSC seems to be set to on Position, or the "NTSC enabled Switch" is set to off.
The Service Manual says that this switch is inside the Commander Unit. I disassembled the unit completely, looked at the Service Manual again and again, but there's nowhere such a switch to find.

Has anyone of you had this problem, or has anyone knowledge in this or can give some hints?

If needed i can send additional pictures and informations.

Hello again,
I could find a solution
There is no "Inhibit Switch for NTSC" or "NTSC enabled Switch" inside the Commander.
The thing to do is close contact W142 and open contact W142 on the Mainboard.
After that playing NTSC Laserdisc's ist possible

That's a nice hack, congrats!!

Julien

I have one of these, the LC-V200 version (NTSC native). Now you need to modify it to output AC3 and digital audio. I successfully modified mine to output both. It's currently direct wired to the VAPB board and it outputs at the back using some donor boards from other players. I made daughter boards to clean it up the VAPB, just need to get the two chips removed and sockets soldered in. You can grab AC3 without the extra circuitry on my daughter board, it was just easier to duplicate the circuit off the IC vs running jumper wires all over the VAPB board.

Would also love to see detailed pictures of the VAPB board (the board that has the service RCA port) on your LC-V100. Curious if it is any different than the V200 version, a lot of unpopulated pcb on mine.

Hello Willis,
im sorry, just saw you reply today, and I am fascinated the way you solved that Audio Output "Problem" for the not existent digital and AC3 output on the LC-V100 / 200 Multichanger.
Would love to add a digital / AC3 output Solution for my LC-V100 two like you did !!
I will send some pictures as soon as I have time, latest on coming weekend !
Thank you so much for your reply to my post

The PD0052 ic is a pretty nice chip, it outputs the digital signal natively from pin 6. But on the autochanger PCB PD0052 pin 6 has no traces coming from it. Before I made the daughter PCB I simply had a jumper wire soldered directly to pin 6 but it wasn't a very clean setup. The PD0052 also can trigger an LED to indicate what type of audio it is outputting, so for fun I ran a 44.1k and a 48k led indicator.

For the AC3 pcb it duplicates the existing circuit found on the autochanger. You could simply jumper off a transistor to grab the AC3 signal (similar to the digital audio) which is what I did originally. But there are also other circuits you have to grab such as mute and +/-5v so the jumper wires start to become messy.

On the back of the machine above the left/right audio and video output I added original pioneer daughterboards which came from other pioneer laserdisc players. The AC3B board comes from a CLD-S315 and the Digital COXB board comes from a CLD-D702. The CLD-D702 COXB board doesn't natively have an optical out port but the unpopulated circuit is there to add it, so I did that as well. I used these boards because they already have nice mounting brackets attached to the PCB's and they are technically original pioneer parts, but sourcing these isn't necessary if you want to build your own pcb's for output (they are very basic circuits).

You will also need to make your own wiring harness to get the signals from the front of the unit to the back. I managed to find some wire that very closely matched the existing wire, so in the picture I posted don't confuse those wires to be original. You can easily take the side panel off to route the wires, don't waste your time like I did trying to run them with it on.

I am also working on a video signal circuit bypass. If you output your video from the command unit the video signal will have gone through two separate on-screen display chips, degrading the signal. The first one is onboard the autochanger unit for the diagnostic OSD (which is more difficult to bypass) and the second is in the commander. I currently take video directly from the back of the autochanger, but it still gets processed through the diagnostic OSD chip. I want to make a bypass board to take the video directly from the BU4053B multiplexer and output it directly to the back of the autochanger, bypassing the diagnostic port ODS IC. The diagnostic port would still function as intended this way, but the video would be as clean as you can possibly get from the autochanger. I would advise to only use audio/video out from the back of the autochanger and not connect those to the commander to then output to your tv/sound system.

Here are the pictures of my LC-V100 VAPB

thank you for all the details! I will have a look on my unit when the time comes to give it a try. by now for me it seems my knowledge in doing this modification is a bit limited
but as always, when I don't hurry and take my time, I maybe have a chance.
also your idea of getting the video signal as pure as possible is stunning.

mate you really do miracle with this machine, i highly respect you technical knowledge