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NAD C541 tray issues

R

Ragnar_AT

Active Member
I got a NAD C541 CD player for free, with the info "the tray mechanism sometimes acts up!". Well, either this was severely understated or the problem had aggravated by the time I got my hands on the player, at any rate it didn't work at all any more. The tray moves very slowly, the motor sounds strained and the tray won't close all the way, it always opens again before the player has any chance to read the CD.

Here is my question: is this likely an easily solved problem like a worn belt or dried lube or am I better off scrapping the unit? I once spent some time fixing computer CD drives but that issue never popped up (mostly it was lens cleaning and tray unjamming).
 
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After a little specific research (forget to google "NAD C541 tray problems" last time) I'd say I have a weak tray motor and decided to ditch the player... bit unfortunate since this is the closest I've ever come to listening to "high end" audio gear.
 
Can't you replace it, find out what type of motor it is and see if you can get
it replaced. I'm not saying to go to NAD and get on but look around.

Tube
 
It might be interesting to strip down an old Sony CD drive... that might have the same motor as the NAD. I'll keep it for some time and look around, but I might be forced to down-size my collection drastically in the future, so I can't cling onto it forever.

Actually this thing might be worth a professional repair... but I didn't find much on the internet about used prices.
 
I had the same player with the same problem. The cost of repair exceeds the value of the unit. This opinion was shared by my local dealer, who stopped selling NAD because so many cd players and AVRs failed. For the cost of repair you can buy a new Cambridge Audio cd player, time to ditch it.
 
Well, under those circumstances I most certainly wouldn't consider a professional repair. It wouldn't hurt to experiment with scrap parts a little though... I wonder if I have any Sony CD-ROM drives in my huge stack of useless computer parts!

I already "frankensteined" a DVD player by replacing the entire drive which turned out to be a bog-standard IDE drive without the metal casing (would have to be a LiteOn for perfect mechanical fit though) so why not give it a try?
 
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