The Uniti Lite is a lot of fun, apart from the CD drive. This is an extremely poor designed part in the otherwise well designed unit. My dealer says that I will have to send the device back and pay the service fee. I did this once already - this is horrendously expensive and absurd for such a small thing. I asked the support for assistance, but they don’t even bother to answer.
I know this issue has been discussed many times here already (I’m not the only one facing this poor design problem) and I’ve seen some good recommendations from @davidhendon and others.
However, I tried several replacement belts, but always don’t get the perfect size or thickness, or…
Can someone provide a source for this belt or tell me the exact specifications of the part so I can search fora source.
Thanks for any ideas?
What I did was buy a pack of 100 mixed belts “for cassette players” on eBay. It cost about £10 and it was easy to find something that worked. It’s several years ago that I did this and it needs doing again, but as I don’t use the Unitilite, I haven’t got round to it.
@NeilS told us that Naim change the whole drive because just changing the belt doesn’t last long enough reliably. But it’s an expensive fix. If you still have the original belt, or one that did work but has now stretched, then you could also try his suggestion of dropping the belt in very hot water (nearly boiling) for a couple of seconds or so. Not longer I think, but this is experimentation!
Thanks, that was also my approach. I wasn’t so lucky with my set of replacement belts. There wasn’t one that did work properly (mine were to weak.) I’ll need to give it another try and try to get a different set.
Is there a way to get a replacement drive from Naim?
(My dealer says no. ) I couldn’t find out who is the manufacturer of the drive.
Naim won’t sell spare parts (except to approved servicers) as they require them for their service needs.
Chat GPT says it’s a Teac drive, which is what I also thought. I am sure Richard is right about how Naim would react to a request from a dealer for a belt.
It’s not slot loading, so might be ChatGPT guessing again.
In the images I’ve seen there are no identifying stickers or stamps to give any indication who made it, and there’s no mention in any review.
That sounds frustrating.
Assuming you don’t want the expense of replacing the whole mech (which sounds like a waste of an otherwise good mech IMO) for the belt to fail yet again, have you considered:
- buying something like a Shanling CR60 CD transport to supply the Lite’s internal DAC? Possibly cheaper than the Naim repair?
- removing the belt altogether and manually opening and closing the CD draw with a little tab attached to the CD draw itself by a bit of Velcro. I did this with one of my Arcam CD5s - the model has a well-know draw cog issue and it did the job fine. The only thing I had to do was press the open/close button to tell the player that a new disc had been put in and to read the TOC. I did eventually replace the draw cog because a) it was cheap to buy and b) I could install it myself in a couple of hours maximum. Owning two of these machines I’ve done this twice now.
My father had the belt replaced in a Sony CDP-EX300 - the original lasted 20 years - hasn’t been a problem in the last 10 years since.
Having read a few posts again, @NeilS said that Naim don’t stock the drive belt at all because they replace the whole loading mechanism (not the CD drive then) if needed. Whoever makes that, the drive belt isn’t going be a special manufacture and if you Google CD drive belts, there are numerous offerings. So if it were me, then I would look into that angle first of all.
As I said before, I should do this to my UnitiLite, but I must install the new green screen first. It’s far too expensive to get Naim to do a proper repair of several faults because that would cost more than the unit would be worth after repair.