Trying to FIX an Expensive 1985 Bang & Olufsen CD Player - BeoGram CD50

Vince, you made my day! I am the original owner of this B&O CD player along with the matching Beocord cassette tape player, Beomaster AM/FM radio/amp and the Beomaster remote. I even have the amazing Beolab Penta speakers. The entire system has been in perfect working order. However, some months ago the CD player stopped working. As you discovered in your CD player, the loading tray in mine kept going in and out, in and out and wouldn't play the CD. Thanks to you, I fiddled with that little micro-switch on the loading door and cleaned the CD sensor. It totally fixed the issue I was having and plays good as new again. You saved me tons of time and likely hundreds of dollars in repair costs had I taken it to someone who could work on my CD player (if I could even find such a person in Seattle). I didn't even have to do any disassembly since your video pointed me to the likely cause of the problem. So, thank you once again.

Thanks for your informative videos! As several others have pointed out, your patience and attention to detail in the process of finding the fault is important. I also like that you do it without advanced and expensive equipment and tools. You show that everyone can really do it at home and that is inspiring!

A tip for you when dealing with stuff like this, VCRs etc. which have gears and rely on proper timing. Get yourself a marker pen and mark the position of the gears relative to each other before disassembly. If you look at those gears you will see they have timing marks (small holes) that should line up with each other when you put it all back together. On some gears the timing marks are small arrows that should point to each other. Something to watch out for in future.

Vince, mate! Today i successfully soldered in my first QFN48 pkg chip. As we as couple of 0201 caps. Wow. So smarrr! Tinyful! But your videos gave me courage finally. And you know what??? THE BLOODY THING (tablet that lost sound due to alc5640 failure - burned dot on the old chip) WORKS AND SOUNDS FINE!

I love B&O devices, they were the top end of the electronics market and out of reach for 99.9% of the population. I was lucky my grandfather spent a few years in Denmark in the 70's and fell in love with them then and refused to have any other devices if a B&O one was available. The sound, quality, design and pure gadgetry of them back then was so far beyond anything else and your video's stand as testament to how good they are even today. Keep the video's coming my friend. They are both entertaining and informative.

Vince, last week you helped me fix a Beocord 5500, and now you are here again to help with my CD 50! I used your video to help take mine apart - I had the same belt issue, plus a totally dislodged disc holder. Everything fixed and working now.

Fixed! I had to wait a week for the belt to come from Portugal but all sorted thanks to Vince and this excellent video. Most important thing for me was to set the man timing cog in the right position, i took lots of photos of the timing cog in various positions ie: drawer fully closed, fully open and closed with the clamp raised (important), cleaned the laser with isopropyl and general clean up inside with contact cleaner too and now the player works like a dream and sounds surprisingly good!

This video helped my wife and I to repair my late father's Beogram CD 50 and it works brilliantly now! Thank you so much for making this video Vince!!

I must compliment you on having the patience to put it together and take it apart over and over ... Not having enough knowledge myself I have dismantled many things and put them back together again and again ... You have inspired me to continue practicing patience ...you are gifted... You are talented as I know only god could have given you such enthusiasm to reach the ultimate goal of success ... Blessing to you and your family and please continue to bring light to us amature repairmen... Raul... PS would like to meet you someday and shake your hand and get your autograph ...

Beautiful job mate! I had a B & O tangent tracking turntable from the same series years ago that I had to troubleshoot in a similar fashion. I remember the joy I experienced when I figured out all the adjustments and microswitch bits before I got it to function Good job!

Nice work! I fixed up one of these a few years back and what an adventure! You don't strictly need to mess around with the adjustment screw at the back (altho I suspect this is the proper way to re-adjust it). Rather the main cog in your video is misaligned with the tray by one or more teeth. Due to the complex nature of the loading mechanism it needs to be perfectly aligned with the tray to close and clamp properly. Otherwise it'll just spit out the disc again. Please also note that it says "Load" in the front of the tray. This is meant indicate a pressure point (or even emulate a button) as you push in the tray to close it. The paint inside the top cover was indeed applied at the factory to provide shielding. It's applied to the bottom of the outer aluminium sheet through a protrusion in the plastic. You will notice a spring mechanism on the left side of the CD transport. This interfaces with the paint to ground when the case is closed, and you will normally see some wear on the paint at the contact point from the spring tension. Supposedly this type of paint was incredibly expensive back in the days.

I always mark the shaft position and the position of rotation on gears and cams before removing them. Especially ones that are not keyed. The number of problems I have had in the past with gearing mechanisms 😭 I always take a picture and mark them. I really enjoyed the video. Love all your B&O repair videos.

@1:04:02 The 16:1 almost certainly refers to track 16 index 1. The CD format includes sub-tracks called indexes. This was rarely taken advantage of in commercial CDs so players soon dropped the feature, therefore most people are ignorant of the concept. Generally, pre-roll on a track is index 0 which often shows as a negative time on many players. Players always start at index 1 when you jump to a track but will play through index 0 when the previous track ends. The whole point of the index system was to support jumping within a track to things like different "movements" in an orchestral piece. i.e. A long four-movement orchestral track might have an index 1, 2, 3, and 4 (as well as the aforementioned index 0). In a practical sense, index 0 was usually either blank/quiet time between tracks or the bulk of the fade between tracks on albums where one track fades into the next one. The first track would "end" at the beginning of a fade between tracks, then index 0 of the next track would contain the bulk of the fade (and the player would count from some negative time and move towards zero), and lastly index 1 would start (0:00) at the end of the fade. Hope that explanation makes sense.

Love your videos Vince..... you say you're not an expert in this kind of repair but from your videos, you do a bang good job.... You have a good grasp of the mechanicals and this shows in this video... these old systems often relied on quite complex mechanics to do their job....A VHS recorder for example is horendous to resolve a loading problem, a million and one things to think about and you can't see half of it........ Keep going Vince......

That would have wound up on my pile of disassembled failures because I have no patience. That's why I have a whole room in my house of failed electronic repairs. Cheers on the great job!

This was so satisfying to watch. Reinforces my view that persistence, patience and thinking a problem through will always win in the end. I must try something similar, and see how I get on.

I like the way you speed up the boring parts and the lovely classical music you add - really enjoyable video - Well Done !

Genius! Can't thank you enough, thought my CD player was a gonna but mine turned out to have exactly the same problem so I followed your instructions re adjusting that little screw at end of 'arm/door mechanism' thingy(!) and presto works perfectly now. You are the best Kevin!!!XXXX

Incredible problem solving skills combined with relentless perseverance to get to a solution. Admirable.

You're a huge improvement over me! If I take something apart it's guaranteed to never go back together again, there will be more or less parts than came from the electronic device and there will be fireworks shooting from it as it commits suicide! I've seen warning labels on electronics specifically addressing me, warning me to drop the screwdriver and back away. It's cool to see someone actually fix something! Great job, great channel!!