Hi,

This is a sister post to one concerning a Beocord 5000.

I have recently bought a Beogram CD50.    I have downloaded the service manual.

An aside.  When I bought the full B&O 5000 system I was told the CD player did not work and the price reflected this.  Got it home, put a CD correctly into the tray and pushed play.  Music and very good sounding music.  

There is an issue with the CD50.  When you put a CD in and it loads sometimes it seems to hang with a soft whirling noise.  Other times it might jump or jitter into the first track perhaps loosing the first few seconds of the track.  Loading time is the better part of a minute which is long by modern standards but I am unsure by mid 80's standards.

Questions:

1. Does this sound like a lubrication service type fix?
2. Slight realignment of microswitch?
3. Anything else I should check whilst the covers are off?

I have yet to take the covers off - bit slow and I just love listening to it - but hope it is like the Beocord 5000 in which case it should be a nice fixable job (assuming parts are locatable) compared with the now-a-day dump when it fails stuff.

Thanks in anticipation.

Cheers

Richard

I had a CD50 for a while. It shouldn't take more than 10 seconds to read the disc, even on that old player, and jumping means it's not reading the disc well. I would recommend cleaning the lens of the laser (search this forum or google, just be gentle and have it powered off!!). There are also some microswitches that sense if the drawer is open/closed etc. and those might get oxidized.

I believe the most common problem is that the spindle motor - which is an odd concoction by itself - gets stiff. It may seem to spin freely, but just not freely enough. The track info is on the inner edge of the CD, which needs the most rotational speed, and if the motor has problems, it may not reach the correct speed before the deck gives up.

The bad part is that you can't really relube the motor without dismantling it completely and giving it a proper overhaul, which is a lot of tinkering. Mine was slow in the beginning, but improved to usable condition by just playing (trying to play) the deck which apparently had sat long unused after a loading belt failure.

The random start on track 1 (especially when coming back from the end) is almost a feature of CD50 at this age. You may be able to improve it by cleaning and relubing the tracks the laser block moves on.

The loading mechanism will need a clean & lube at some point, but if it works well now, I'd say leave it alone (quite a bit of work).

Resist the temptation to touch any electrical adjustments...