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I picked up a Denon DCD-1500 CD player very cheaply on eBay recently and it sounds pretty horrible, worse than my Walmart LG DVD player. It sounds veiled with tubby bass etc. Is it just bad DACs from the 80's or a cheap op amp in the player? If the latter, I can probably steal the signal right after a DAC then run it through a tube buffer. Will some cleaning for the lens help at all?

I've worked on a few and they sound good. Well, good as digital goes *shudder*

The fault will be one of two places: digital side or analog side. If it's the analog side, it can be fixed. If digtal, you're screwed

Cheers!

Thanks. I opened it and it's got two Burr Brown PCM54HP DACs. I wonder if they are any good to hijack the signal from or would it be lost cause.

Here's the datasheet: http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/pcm55.pdf

Looks like a simple R2R ladder/buffer.

Here's the service manual:
https://www.hifiengine.com/manual_libra ... 1500.shtml

IC300 is turning the datastream into 16-bit, uncompressed WAV audio for decoding. Each channel is independent after IC300. If the analogue was bad, one channel would likely be worse than the other.

How's the power supply voltages? Capacitor health (need a recap?) Solder joints, etc?

I'd check for proper alignment. The control/audio recovery chips either work or they don't. If it's aligned, the head itself may be pooched.

Had a B&O CD where everything was good, but bad audio. The laser itself was *really* low on power and only recovered enough data to spin the CD at the right RPM and read the odd music. Otherwise it was done and done

Cheers!