WARNING - XL1B 200 CD/DVD disc changer

[marrandy]

Hello.

I bought a Sony Vaio XL1B last month.

I finally bought enough H/D capacity to setup my system and rip CD/DVD's.

Cleaned and loaded 200 CD/DVD's.

I have been having a lot  of problems riping them.. Lot's of aborts overnight etc.

Ejected some troublesome DVD's and found major circular sandpaper streaks over them and some with gouges within the last 1 centimeter/half an inch of the exterior.  Powered off and removed the case and manually extracted all but the one in the drive.

Out of 200 clean, almost pristine discs, 70 have major damage (ie. the ones I have tried won't play in my DVD player), others have many minor scratches and there are barely 20 that are still pristine.

Be warned about this player.  I would advise you to make copies and put copies in instead of the originals.

I will, of course be contacting Sony about this and will let you know what they say.

But I expect I will have to spend some time and money repairing these discs.

Not happy...at all.

[dgirard]

Hmmmm....

Very strange...I have not seen anyone else here reporting this issue, so hopefully it's defective hardware on your end, and hopefully Sony replaces those damaged disks...

When you opened it up, could you tell what caused the damage?...was there a metal burr somewhere?...internal to the drive maybe?....

We look forward to hearing what Sony has to say...

I have one of these that I just purchased, but have not yet setup...I think I'll wait a bit, and definately test with non-commercial/replaceable discs!

[colinjones]

Guys

I have read on other forums many times (and on Amazon) people complaining about exactly this experience - it certainly does not seem uncommon. The impression I got, however, was that the '3' version was better for this than the '1' and '2'... perhaps not after all. I think I recall Thom saying that the mechanism internally was the same between all 3 just the drive changed....

From what I have read in other forums, I get the impression that not many people had any joy with Sony on the issue, so good luck!

[ddamron]

I've done a lot of reading on that / those units.. (I want to get one)

There's a how-to out there somewhere that steps you through realigning the Carriage mechanism..
I did read it, and it doesn't seem to be very hard.. Maybe that will help you..

it does involve a screwdriver... lol

Dan

[1audio]

I have been through the Powerfile (big brother of the Sony) several times. I had two junkers here that I discarded, just too broken. They are very similar and I'm amazed Powerfile can get so much for them. Its not a particularly sturdy design. When aligned it should be stable but won't transport well. The changer won't cause circular scratches, it takes the drive to do that, but possibly the relationship between them is an issue. It doesn't read a significant portion of the disks I have fed it. I find the beast too troublesome for my use for now.

[MediaMonkey]

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=10415037#post10415037

[ddamron]

THAT'S IT!!!

Thanks MediaMonkey!

[Matthew]

I have added this warning, and adjustment advice, to the Sony VGP-XL1B wiki article. Please update it with any more specific info, especially preemptive diagnosis.