A small development. I'm posting this mainly as info for others.
I've been noticing, (and been driven crazy by it), that the sound delivered by the player can be completely different from one day to the next, and has often been pretty bad sounding. My kids gifted me a MFSL sacd of Supertramp Breakfast in America for Christmas and the player had a hard time even reading it. It took around a half minute of hunting before the cd would play and it sounded like shit.
I've been trying to figure this out, started hunting for new firmware to download (no luck with that) and info about calibrating the laser. Others of you that are used to using newer equipment may chuckle at what comes next but I'm just not used to players that do self-calibration.
Now I do know that if one loads a cd, shuts down the player and pulls the plug, and then plugs it in and starts it, then it runs a self calibration routine. I found that info after I replaced the laser and followed it. Well and good but then why has mine been playing wildly differently from day to day and mostly getting worse?
Well, aren't I a bonehead. I mean really really a bonehead.
Because I don't like to leave equipment in standby all the time I have it all plugged into power strips which I kill every day after use with a bluetooth wall wart. So instead of having 5 units in standby I only have 1 (the wall wart). But because of this I have been effectively pulling the plug on the player every day and starting it without a cd in the tray for it to self calibrate with. (facepalm) And it never dawned on me until today that I wasn't thinking at all clearly.
Now that I have finally figured this out it seems so obvious that I feel more than a bit dumb but as I said I'm also just not used to having a player that works this way. So now I leave a cd in the tray when I shut it down for the day and after starting the next day it sounds just fine now.
Hopefully this post will be useful for the next guy that does what I did. Well, probably nobody else is that stupid, but you never know.
Cheers,
James