Teardown and (very) minor repair of a Pioneer Elite PDM-900 "Reference" CD changer from 1988!
hi everybody don't worry this channel is not turning into a channel all about audio i I talk about all different things here and I'm going to get back to some different subjects soon i've got one or two more audio videos to get through before we get there but this right here this is my Pioneer PDM 900 from 1988 it was a top-of-the-line CD player in its day pioneer reference series CD player that became the elite line uh just one or two years after this i really wanted one of these at the time could not afford it these were quite expensive back in the day they're still a little expensive now but I saw one online one night few weeks ago and uh yeah maybe I'd had one or two glasses of wine but decided to pull the trigger on it it was listed as working there was a video showing it working of course when I got it it was not working so today we're going to repair it trust me on this one this is going to be a quick repair i already know because I've already done it now just so you're not disappointed later I had suspected that this had the same problem that almost all of these have and I wanted to show you how to fix that and that was the laser lens falling out literally falling out from the mechanism that happens to all of these because the laser is upside down opened it up looked at it you'll see and the laser lens is still there but hopefully you can still use this if you want some guidance on what to do if you're not getting any recognition of discs from one of these players at all and that that includes all Pioneer six disc changers that's what this problem is unique to uh those changers changers like this and this was the best one they made but they're all the same basically internally they have the laser mechanism hung upside down you put the disc in with the label side down the data side up and it reads from above so over time that glue just lets go the lens falls out was not the case with this one this one had something else but again quick repair for once you're going to get a quick video i still think it's going to be interesting i'm going I'm going to compare and contrast this CD player with another model six disc changer same basic type of CD player but you'll see what makes this one um I mean you may or may not see what what makes this one a better player and why I wanted it so bad first let's just go over some of the features in the front so what is it that I like about these things so much well it's it's not really the sound i mean to me all CD players sound very similar even the high-end ones uh and I doubt most people would be able to pick out the difference between CD players based on sound but just look at this thing this to me I mean mine is not in perfect condition but to me this is what a CD player should look like it's just beautiful you got the wood side panels of course um you got to have the wood side panels and these have the glossy veneer it's got it's in that era of pioneer high-end stuff where they had this piano black finish on the front um that carried through to their early Elite stuff and to clarify this because I was a little confused about this myself and I've seen other people uh who are also a little confused about this but this actually was the start of the Elite line pioneers elite components were originally not labeled elite they were called elite in the marketing materials and you can see that here but nowhere on these products does it actually say the word elite it says reference and uh if you look here also the PDM900 is specifically listed in this stereo review buyer guide as an elite model so uh it's labeled on the component itself the exact same way as other Elite products and it's listed as an Elite product in stereo review so uh yeah this is an Elite CD player it's just uh they didn't put that word on their early Elite products you've got tons of buttons all kinds of buttons i love buttons you've got knobs you've got actual switches here this is not just a uh momentary switch this is a real switch you've got this beautiful display it's probably one of the bigger displays uh and and it's like a square display that I've seen on a on a Pioneer player like this and I just love the six dis magazines as well and this one came with both six disc and single disc um so we've got the magazine mechanism there and you can obviously change that out the idea with these was that you would have multiples of these they came in sleeves so you could store them you could actually store them on a shelf as kind of a you know like a like a bookshelf kind of thing and you could store them by genre or alphabetically however you wanted to do it and then you would just pop one of these in when you wanted and you'd have your six discs and you could have as many of those as you want most people I think only ever kept the one that came with the thing but you know if you had especially if you had a car changer you could have multiples of these and then eventually they came out with players that had more than one slot so you could have like 18 discs in three separate magazines all at once to add to this yes I realize there were hundred and even 200 disc changers at one point uh I had one of those at the time i have a picture of it somewhere i don't know where it is but uh around 20201 I had one those are a little different concept with those you're meant to store your discs inside the player and never touch them again it was kind of getting away from this concept of actually inserting discs anytime you wanted to play a disc that is what appeals to me about the six disc changers there's kind of an extra level of tactility there that's what attracts me to physical media at this point that doesn't really exist anymore once you get up to the 100 or 200 disc library changers and I also of course know that five disc carousel CD changers existed pioneer did the six disc magazine thing and a few other brands went along with them on that and then others did the carousel changers and they were kind of two competing formats kind of doing the same thing i just always liked the the magazine changers better the carousel changers just always seemed like kind of a a weird compromise to me and they were not very reliable with those big giant trays that everything was spinning around in all the time the magazine style players uh ended up actually being more reliable in the long run and also the carousel changers they're just they're pretty big they're always big cuz they got to have five discs next to each other so again yeah I I just wasn't a big fan of them i like the uh magazine style changers better anyway now back to the video but I also I do also appreciate the single disc so you can use this as a single dis player and it works just like any other single disc player you can just eject and put a CD in there unlike with the uh the six disc where you have to you know take the tray out and load it up and it just acts like a single disc player when it's got the single disc magazine in there so you've got all your standard CD controls over here play pause stop these light up which is great i love that um you've got your track your direct track access you've got your memory functions level control you can actually control the analog level output of this cds often were known to be well they were mastered hotter than other formats so uh especially if your receiver was kind of a traditional receiver and and wasn't doing any kind of balancing on its own um when you switched over to CD your music was going to probably play a lot louder so yeah I guess in in those days being able to just reduce the level and just keep it there and have your CD player kind of match your record player or whatever might have been a good thing got your direct disc access here you've got uh repeat time time fade edit uh that's a weird one i would I don't think I would use that but you can have it just fade out after a certain time uh you've got other fader controls up here manual fader manual search track search and then a headphone jack with its own line output and here's your remote uh sensor there and this is the remote i love this remote uh it's got a nice screen of its own it'll tell you what uh I mean it's a little hard to read i I don't know if it's back lit let's see if I can find a backlight no I don't think it is i don't think it's back lit i don't see anything any kind of backlight key or anything on here but duplicates all the functions of the front and um I don't think it has extra ones i'm pretty sure it you know that's what I love about CD players like this is all the functions are accessible on the front around here on the back we've got your standard line out RCA jacks we've got your optical out mine nicely still has the cover on it coaxial digital output got a switch you can turn on or off your digital output uh it's not done via software as is uh on many newer players and then we've got this D connector for subc code out and I wondered what that was the manual does list it it's got it uh know if you can see that but right here I'll just read I'll read you what it says subcode out terminal this terminal will be used to output subcodes parenthesis data recordable on compact discs together with audio signals in parenthesis in future audio applications so I don't know if that was ever used for anything let me know if you know in the comments but uh it might have just been one of those like future expansion things that sat and did nothing uh all terminals well all terminals with connections are goldplated of course uh except for the optical terminal which wouldn't really make sense but you never know um yeah and then you've got your standard uh labeling here uh PDM900 made in Japan actually my PDM 430 was still made in Japan as well uh I don't know when or if they ever started making Pioneer stuff elsewhere i'm sure that's it's made somewhere else now uh and mine you can't see it i'll move the camera a little or I'll move the CD player a little but I've got a manufacturer date actually on mine of June 1988 my PDM430 does not have that so I I always like to have that so I guess I should clarify what I'm actually trying to fix and that's that this player just isn't reading discs at all it had taken kind of a wild ride in shipping so I assumed the laser lens had been hanging by a thread and just got knocked loose which is an extremely common problem with these and renders them basically inoperable but it's a five-minute fix with a screwdriver and some superglue you can sometimes find some great deals on six disc changers for that reason though not usually this one i wouldn't hesitate to buy one for cheap that was listed with that specific problem though and you can usually find them pretty easily this player actually has separate screws under the wood panels to hold the case on unlike my Sony tape deck or my old JVC XLZ 555 CD player and I think it's in case you did want to remove them permanently a lot of people did do that towards the end of this era which is something I never understood they're not hurting anything at worst they're just there but I really do think they add to the aesthetic and I always did it's not just a retro thing my roommate who I sold my old JVC player to took the panels off and that thing was never meant to be without them it looked weird with the CD drawer all the way up against the side of the player and it did not have separate screws for the case meaning if you tried to screw those long screws back in without the panels they would go right through the circuit boards inside well guess what that's exactly what my roommate did i wish I never sold him that thing there are just four screws holding the laser mechanism in place plus a ribbon cable that it's probably a good idea to remove before trying to flip the laser over i just wanted to check whether my suspicions were correct before setting it down though and here you see me surprised that the lens is still there and seemingly solid i decided to go ahead and clean it while I was in there though it shouldn't be that dirty since it's hanging upside down and it wasn't but whatever i also thought I should see if the mechanism would move at all manually it's possible that this might have jogged it loose from being stuck i don't know well believe it or not it's working i have never actually had just cleaning the laser lens do anything but maybe that's all this thing needed i don't know or maybe it was that little nudge that I gave to the uh assembly when I put it in there maybe it just got stuck in one spot but I've tried it with both the six disc magazine and and the single here's the six disc and I'll let it run through I and I tried this before i'll let it run through all the discs until it finds the disc that's in there it's playing track one track two just go to track eight playing i realized that I I don't know if I actually ever took footage of this when it was not working which is kind of dumb but yeah it take my word for it it was not working when I got it but now it is here's the single caddy if you wanted to use it like a single CD player as many people did with these higherend models and uh yeah it still ejects kind of violently but basically works like a single CD player except you still do have to put the CD in label side down and the buttons on the unit work too yep let's just take a quick look inside this thing while we're at it so I've got my older not older older to me PDM 430 here on the left and my PDM900 here on the right i thought it'd be fun to just kind of look at the insides and compare them and uh just see what's in here what makes this one you know a better CD player supposedly you know there was a lot of marketing back in those days just like there is today so let's just take a quick look i think just go through each and and see why one is at least considered better than the other all right well I'll start with the PDM900 here and you know I don't know everything about CD players uh I I used to sell them for a living but you know when you sell stuff you you kind of know just enough to convince people of things you don't necessarily know all the ins and outs if you want a good kind of primer on what everything does in a CD player go watch Technology Connections he did a really good series on CD players where he kind of goes through every single thing that's in any CD player and what they do and how a CD player can actually reproduce you know a pure analog waveform and the original analog waveform from a digital source so go check that out it's really good but I'll just run through some stuff here obviously you know some of the things that they did on the reference and later the Elite series is kind of just for show i mean it's got this kind of copper colored case here even the screws are copper colored okay as a guitar player I actually do get this i shielded my Japanese Fender Jazzmaster with copper tape after changing the pickups from stock to something hotter here are my two American Jazz Masters with their brass shielding with aluminum on the pick guards guitar players have a lot of weird audio filelike biases but there is actually some science to copper or brass being superior to aluminum for shielding so why aren't all audio components copper or copper plated because it's expensive now do copper plated screws do anything nah I'm sure that's just a visual detail to match the rest of the case some of the things are kind of a mix of show and and functionality these cables you know later these would all be ribbon cables they're real wires just bundled wires here even some of the ribbon cables themselves are kind of better than what you're going to see later and then as far as the chips go uh I mean we've got a couple of Sony chips here uh I believe one of these is like a regulator chip and the other one um is a signal processor this big chip up here this is a Pioneer chip this is the main IC it's the main processor for the board kind of over here is where I guess the sonic magic happens if you want to call it that we've got two DAXs here i mentioned that I think before two DAXs they are the uh PCM 56P the J variant and if you look that up I mean I looked it up there's different grades of this deck the the highest one I guess is K this is the second from the highest so it's not the highest but it's better than what would be in like a a just a standard mid-range CD player just as importantly as the DAX and again there are two of them uh we've got a filter chip the Yamaha uh 3414 which was pretty well regarded at the time and then we've got two op amp chips which are also going to affect the sound at at least a bit and these are the uh 5532 DDD op amp chips couple other chips here this is like an SRAMM i think this is like a CMOS chip and um I'm not totally sure what this chip does uh this was listed as the filter chip on one site that I found except it was listed wrong it was listed as the PD000036 this is the PD000026A but this is not a filter chip i'm not completely sure what it is and then there's another Toshiba chip down here that I'm not totally sure but yeah I mean this is all like this would have been like this little like DA conversion setup here at the time would have been considered like close to the best you could get maybe not totally the best you could get but pretty far up there so that's definitely you know a point in this thing's favor nowadays i mean you know stuff has improved like you can get really good DAXs now for a very cheap price the DACK in my little Bluetooth receiver that I bought for 90 bucks or whatever i think it was even less than that just a little while ago is probably as good as all of that stuff put together but anyway let's move on to the 430 well moving on to the PDM 430 uh it's pretty clear that things were pretty simplified i mean the 430 was again a little later further down the line actually it was like the second from the bottom so it was going to be simplified anyway it was probably a little simplified just because of the the time that went by as well the mechanism is a little different it's it's not hugely different like I actually expected it to be more different but they have replaced a few metal parts with plastic the motors are different the laser assembly is definitely different so it's got a it's got a different laser i don't know which is more reliable it kind of seems like the 900 is a little more reliable cuz the lens was still in there and usually the lens on these has fallen out long ago these are almost always completely broken and all you have to do is replace that lens that's what I was thinking I was going to need to do today with the 900 but uh yeah I did need to do it with this but this one still doesn't work 100% it skips on CDs it shouldn't skip on so I think the laser is just getting weak and that happens um I hear it happening less on the reference and elite models but anyway so that's the assembly over here i mean this is much smaller board everything's kind of consolidated the transformer is actually on the board whereas it's kind of off to the side on the 900 and then we've still got the the two Sony chips they're different chips but they're still the same they're in the same place they're they do the same thing same with this Pioneer chip again it's an updated chip but that's the main IC i don't really see I don't know if there's like a dedicated CMOS chip on here but we've got we've got two DAXs again and I think maybe one of these is the DACK and one's the filter or maybe they're both DAXs and they have a built-in filter i'm not sure after a little more internet searching this chip here is the DAC it's an 18bit DAC one single DAC for both channels the NPC chip is the digital filter it's an eight times oversampling filter if you want to compare that to the PDM900 that has two 16bit DAXs one for each channel and also a Yamaha eight times oversampling digital filter so which one is technically better i'm I'm not sure it's hard to find like a direct comparison of these things online uh I haven't found one but uh you know time did march forward pretty quickly and technology was moving so it is possible actually that what's in the PDM 430 here is actually better than what's in the PDM900 again I doubt anyone's going to hear the difference though i should also mention that the PDM 430 has no digital output at all so if you don't like the DAC that's in the PDM 430 you're kind of stuck with it these are now uh we got a Sano LC78820 and then we've got an NPC SM5840 BP and then the op amps let's see rc 458 DDD yeah so different op amp chips you know it always sounds fine to me i mean every CD player pretty much sounds fine to me and I doubt most people are going to hear a difference between any of them but these are just from what I can tell in my you know 5 minutes of Google searching these are just kind of more generic more uh mass market kind of components so yeah and and just the construction and everything i mean it's it's we've just got one big ribbon like thin fragile ribbon cable here another one this is the same ribbon cable well it's not the same though it's it's in the same spot as on the other model but uh it's just flimsier like you can just feel it and yeah like it's it's just a simplified board it's smaller there's there's a lot more empty air in the case even though the case itself is also a little smaller so you know these are not my hairs that are in here i don't think maybe they are but um yeah that's pretty much it it's just interesting and to me I mean the PDM900 like it it's it's the insides of it are as beautiful as the outside the 430 it's it's just kind of there and and that's fine that's kind of how it was marketed and what it was intended as it was just a basic six disc CD changer whereas the 900 intended for people with more discriminating tastes I guess here's what Pioneer had to say about what makes this a high-end CD player uh multiplay CD player designed for high quality sound with 8 FS digital filter independent leftright twin linear envelope DA converter system class A operation FET buffer amplifier and ACU focus system so uh the convenience of CD magazines is combined with a design for high quality sound via the non-residentson concept whatever that is eight times oversampling digital filter glitchless twin DA converter system with independent left and right that's the two DAXs that you saw in there class A operation FET buffer amplifier four circuit independent power supply yeah it is it does have a pretty chunky power supply in there acu focus system that again has to do with the laser and maybe that's why it still works and goldplated output terminals this was a big deal at the time i guess it still kind of is people like goldplated stuff uh it doesn't oxidize so you're supposed to get better uh better connections over the long term so yeah I guess it it it it makes sense and it's got all these convenience features a easy listening play through the oneshot transmission remote control unit featuring a large capacity title input function so you can actually input the title you can program up to 10 magazines for 256 steps and it'll remember that and uh when an 8 character title is entered the title will be displayed when the program is called up so that's kind of neat I guess uh let's see you've got fade editing uh onetouch fade stuff like that that that you know I I would never use that but uh digital out terminal optical and coax multi-function fluorescent display I I love the display on these I love all Pioneer amber displays but this one is particularly good let's see output level displays output level which is bizarre um but again this was like during the transition from analog to digital so people would have probably been crazy about that headphone jack with volume control high performance pickup ensures high fidelity playback it's a laser single disc magazine is also provided to convert the unit into a single disc player as well and people are confused about this sometimes these came with both i see people selling these with only one or the other sometimes and you know there are pe I see people talking online about how oh I found the single disc version of this player no you just found the player with a single disc magazine in it so yeah it came with both it should come with both mine did come with both so uh I guess kudos to the uh original owner for keeping them both often you just see these with whatever the last magazine was that was inside them at the time well I hope you enjoyed that simple but at least successful repair attempt on this Pioneer PDM900 along with the comparison between it and my PDM430 i hope you got something out of it whether it was knowledge enjoyment whatever anyway I will see you guys next time
2025-05-02 21:39
