I'm new to the laserdisc game. I'm looking for one primarily to play live concerts, so the audio quality is the biggest priority.

Obviously, clean video output is preferred but i.e. a cld-97 is $1000 on ebay and the one cld-d704 I found on marketplace is asking $500.

My budget is 300-500. I'm located in South Carolina so there's not much on ebay, craiglist, or fb marketplace nearby.
I do have a decent soldering workbench so I figure I'll just take on issues from shipping...

Hi, welcome.

If you want to use the player's DAC, I would try for a CLD-95. If you will be using optical, you can get a much cheaper player.

Not all shipping related issues are repairable without donor parts and some require special equipment. It is better off playing the waiting game for something to show up within driving distance.

I see, fair enough.

Optical works for me. I plan on primarily recording the video/audio output and playing that from a different system, but RCA for my analog audio stack would be nice as well.

I concur w/ cplusplus that the CLD-95 would probably be the best from the audio side since this player has the 8x oversampling, 20 bit filters. The video may subjectively not be on par w/ later players but at the same time it's a pure analog output unlike the 703 and above players that have more digital processing.

In addition, if you could find a decent outboard DA Converter that is of the multi bit variety (like the 95), you can pretty much pick any player you like that has an optical and/or coax digital output that you can connect it up to and get the same warmer sound you might be looking for.

Modern DACs beat anything ever built into an LD player. I’d concentrate on anything known for reliability and durability that also has a digital out and then let something else render the sound.

Since you’re shipping I’d maybe try for a single sided clunker. As long as the DAC is outboard they will sound the same. Solder joints are not what breaks during shipping. It’s usually plastic parts that are now quite unobtainable. Nobody who knows what they are doing has total confidence that any player is repairable now, even guys who have repaired the same model twice. It’s a probability battle with LD now, as in, “I probably can/can’t fix that player but we’ll see...”. You can break some LDs players just by shaking them really hard so while *insanely* overpacking them is a good start you’ll need a little luck no matter how well they pack it.

CLD-1090

To add insult to injury, it seems the majority of broken players I buy for parts end up in even worse shape upon arrival.

Good news, I checked marketplace again and found a seller about 90 miles away, with various players including a DVL-919 and a CLD-D701. Asking between $100-$200/player.

In your budget the best LD player would be Philips CDV-488. It is a single sided machine with respectable picture but Philips TDA1541a S2 double crown Dac chips on the audio side makes it a very interesting player. It is not a very common player and it should be relatively cheap. I know Kurtis owns one and he should be able tell more about it.

Pioneer HLD-X9 and X0 has the burr brown PCM1702 which are derived from PCM63. You will see these two in the best multibit DACs every made lists. They were very expensive to make and after one minor revision (PCM1704) TI/burr brown stopped making multibit Dacs. There are other LD players with lesser quality mutlibit DACs (CLD-95/97 is one of them). I wouldn’t call them audiophile level but still very good. Some of these players also have a separate power supply for the audio circuitry which is probably more important than the DAC chip itself (even if use Toslink or Coax).

The 95 uses a multi-bit DAC and the 97 changed to bitstream. In my CDV-488 I upgraded the op amps to the BB2604, Swapped out the Audio power supply diode bridges and other diodes with Fast settling ones to lower the sound floor, balanced the output from the DAC to have 0V offset so I could remove the output decoupling capacitor. It will give audiophile CD players a good run for its money. You cannot do all this with bitstream DAC's as they don't have the warmth found in the multi-bit DAC's. I'd say the CDV-488, HLD-X9 and HLD-X0 are the best stock units that can have some parts replaced to have really nice sound. Remember digital Audio is only 16 bits and processing that correctly is what makes the sound great, that is what the Philips TDA1541 DAC does. Back in the TDA1541 days the purpose for multi-bit DAC's greater than 16 bits was to process the audio with a larger signal swing as the DAC makers had minor 0V crossover distortion and the larger swing helped reduce the distortion. The TDA1541 would successfully cross over the 0V point accurately and that is why some of the audiophile companies would buy this DAC from Philips and design their units to incorporate this chip. I agree the PCM1702 is also very good and should be respected the same way. The issues is that you need to have an audiophile mentality in listening to the sound to care about this. If you are streaming audio or listening to the compressed files from iTunes or others you already lost the full audiophile sound so you don't need to worry about this.

To the original question in this thread, I agree the CLD-95 would be the way to go but you'll want to use the composite output unless you don't care about the chroma verses luminance line shift in the Y/C output. With the CDV-488 you have to at a minimum put in a higher quality decoupling capacitor for the audio output. If you want do do a lot of modifications I prefer the CDV-488. If you like the bitstream sound get a CLD-D704, the 704 has the same audio components used in the CLD-99. Or if you have an audiophile processor then run the digital out directly to it and you can use any player with a digital output as mentioned above. If you want a 704 PM me.