Servo adjustment on Sony SACD players

[Decky]

I discovered this recently and by accident so I thought it might be useful to share it. Old(er) Sony SACD players from their awesome ES series and including a more modest model XB-940 are very decent pieces of equipment - SCD-1 was proclaimed as the best SACD player ever built. Also, there are a lot of them around that are modified by Joe Rasmunssen with Alan Right upgrade modules that makes them even better. However they all suffer from progressive laser misalignment that drives them virtually useless after a period of time. They start refusing disks, skipping, loosing timing etc. Well a good news is that Sony built in a "Auto Adjustment" process in all of them that can be accessed through player's Test Mode. All players have this explained in their service manuals. I attached the service manual supplement that describes this for SCD-XB940.

After doing this procedure I do not have any problems with any of the disks that player refused to play before (there were only 3 of them). Also I think that clarity improved on other disks since the laser readjustment controls the jitter.

[Stump]

Thanks Decky
I resent purchased a SONY DVP-S9000ES and had the issue of it not reading the SACD layer of KRAFTWORKs MIN MAX International. Because the second disk worked I blamed the Disk and sent it back to Germany. Ill look into Auto Adjustment ....
Eamonn

[Decky]

...and the same thing for SCD-1 and scd-777ESsince they share most of the components.