CD5x L channel dead - scrap or worth repairing?

Hi-Fi Corner
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I have a CD5x bought secondhand from Signals several years ago together with a Flatcap. I mainly use streaming to a Nac 272 with XPS DR, but it’s still good to be able to play CDs and I have never found out how to find classical music in a streaming system set up for ordinary music, so I use CD for classical, streaming for nearly everything else.

The CD player recently lost the LH channel, that’s both on the DIN output I normally use and the phono which I tested. Fault persisted with and without the FC, reinserting the jumper plug.

I reflected on my options and bought a s/h CD5x on ebay for £400, that way I get to not scrap the FC as well. Looks like £400 is the value of a working CD5x.

Question is: is the old CD5x serviceable at all, and given the age of it, is the cd spinning bit near the end of it’s service life anyway? Every other CD player I have owned started to skip on not play CD-Rs, indeed the replacement seems to search to tracks a bit faster than my original player, despite the latter being a higher serial number. That gives me a bad feeling about the cd spinning section of my original player, though in fairness it never skipped.

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Posted March 2023:

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Thanks - sounds like it’s worth hanging onto the faulty one to scavenge the mechanism if and when the new one fails.

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If it’s a channel down regardless of whether RCA or DIN then I wonder whether it’s a DAC issue or something else. Perhaps @NeilS has an idea here…

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The right channel went on my CD5X earlier this year without any notice - just lost the channel - completely dead.

It was diagnosed as the DAC in the right channel. Dispatched to Naim with a quick turnaround - seem to recall the cost was £360 (I think).

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The DAC would be the most likely point of failure, occasionally can be a shorted cap in the analogue filter stage.
Certainly fixable though.

Regards
Neil.

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The CD5X is a great player well worth of repair regardless of cost. I owned one and probably prefered than CD5XS i i had later

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