Laser Disc Players

A friend of mine brought me a couple of boxes of electronic equipment . Among the mismatched sets of theater speakers was a Pioneer laser disc player . I cleaned it up and hooked it all up . It works really well except for one of the right audio outputs is fuzzy . Are these worth anything at all ? Or should I just buy a bunch of the discs . A guy I know has about 500 discs for sale . Thanks in advance for any insight . maxx

Players are available for $200ish on Fleabay... plenty of disks there also...

Which model is it? I might want it for spare parts to support the two LD players I own now.


Granted, I haven't fired one up to watch a movie for longer than I care to admit, but they're not going anywhere.

It is a Pioneer cld 1010

That's a different chassis than either of my units. But it's a good unit. The noise problem in one channel could be as simple as a capacitor going bad or
a cold solder joint. Hard to tell without actually troubleshooting it.


CJ

Thanks guys . maxx

Oh yeah, I just remembered: You WILL hear noise instead of audio out of one channel if the LD that is being played has a Dolby Digital soundtrack
and the player doesn't have the DD decoder. The digital audio takes the place of one of the stereo channels. The player could be just fine.

Try it by playing an LD that's marked only as having stereo sound, without any surround sound formats or logos.


CJ

I paid around $60 for a Pioneer CLD-V2600 unit. About 20 years old but it works fine and is a sturdy design for industrial/kiosk applications. No Toslink or AC-3 coax, though.

Like cmjohnson said, your problem is that you're playing a disc with AC-3 audio encoded in the right analog channel. Most LD's have two audio tracks, one analog and one digital. Laserdiscs with AC-3 (Dolby 5.1 or 6.1) use the right channel of the analog audio track to hold unmodulated AC-3 data. When played through regular speakers this sounds like white noise. You can either switch over to the digital audio track or use only the left analog channel. This may require a remote, however some Pioneer units with have controls on the font panel to do it or a set of dip switches on the rear that can be used to change default settings. Pioneer has all of their old LD player documentation online, so it's not difficult at all to get a .pdf of your player's manual.

You can find LD's on Ebay or at Half Price Books, which usually has good discs for $6 each or between $1 and $2 in the bargain bin.

ETA: When you get it working, go find the LD's of the original Star Wars trilogy. Get the "Faces" set - you won't regret it.

What is the video resolution of a laser disk?

A Bluray player has 1080 lines of resolution.

For NTSC (North American and Japanese) Laserdiscs the resolution is 480i, the same as a standard NTSC broadcast and double that of a VHS tape. When using a composite video connection it's comparable to a DVD, however it doesn't have the resolution of a DVD using component cables from a progressive-scan player.

Since LD is an analog video format you can sometimes have issues with the separation of the video and audio signals, however it's not too bad. You will also get some of the typical NTSC color distortions.

Oh, with those low resolution formats,... why bother?

Because HAN was the only one who shot.

I still run a pioneer LD player, myself. I only have three LDs.

wonder which ones...

No, I mean, ...really, ... honestly, ...why are you considering doing this?

On a small TV it'll look just fine. (27" or smaller)

On a larger set it'll look just fine if it's run through a scaler or line multiplier. The image will be a bit soft compared to HD, but still very watchable.

We were perfectly happy with standard definition for 50 years. It's not that bad. Sure, HD is better, but it doesn't make NTSC unwatchable.

The movie should be good enough that you don't mind that it's not presented in HD 1080P or better.

The reason to watch a movie is to watch the story, not to analyze the picture quality.


CJ

Standard resolution images displayed on standard-sized TV (usually about 25" diagonal) is fine. Then again, back then, there wasn't a choice. Standard resolution on a truly large screen (50+") is really bad. I don't want this to be a debate about resolution and our respective perception and our personal acceptability criteria.

I'm wondering why the OP considered "investing" in this at this time and what other options were considered?

I've been playing with HD before it existed in the consumer market. I was watching movies scaled up to 1080p on an 8 foot wide screen via a projector that was built for 2500x2000 resolution
back before HD was even a mature standard. I KNOW what NTSC looks like on a huge screen. The bigger it gets, the worse it gets, but with at least a line doubler it really isn't bad at all.

For a LONG time, my favorite piece of gear in my video system was a Faroudja scaler that output "only" 800x600. It made NTSC formatted (standard definition) material look absolutely marvelous.
Its great strength was what it did with regard to color processing. I've STILL never seen better reproduction of color, even in HD.

I have LD players in my setup and frankly, they're not going anywhere at any foreseeable time. I have some movies that still aren't even on DVD, let alone Blu-Ray.


CJ

Is that why the OP wants a laser disk? Are you and he trying to preserve some aspect of film heritage (movies not on DVD or Bluray)? How about some feed bacl from the OP?

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