They are excellent decks, great performers and a fantastic design.
Absolutely worth restoring. Not sure why anybody would say otherwise.
Clean the laser lens.
Check if the drive suspension rubber parts have deformed, allowing the drive to sag down.
This typically causes the disc to rub on the tray when rotating, and it can cause many strange symptoms.
Replacing the tray belt is a two-minute job when the cover is off.
Check for cracked solder joints at connectors and other large components, and
particularly the center pins of the large filter capacitors.
And replace capacitors on the servo board (grab a kit containing the correct type of caps).
They can also cause many strange problems.
Keep in mind, that CDRs are not following standards. The same goes for many types of
copy-protected discs (“Copy-Control” etc.).
Most Beogram CD5500 will play CDRs without any problems, but it cannot be guaranteed
that all decks will play all CDR discs.
And not all CDRs age well. Over time they may lose information making them more or less unreadable.
Martin
