Sony DVP S330 DVD player has a few problems

Not necessarily a case of it being "so old" in lacking Component Video and CD-R. Sony's first DVD player from 1997, the DVP-S7000, had Component and CD-R playback. They just got cheap with subsequent models so the average joe could afford them.

C'mon baby let's do the twist was the audio track right?

I understood that the incompatibility of CD-R discs, was more due to the majority of early players having fixed current laser power supplies and laser gain, and therefore as the reflectivity of the dye-recorded media is less that that of a pressed red book disc, that it was hit and miss as to whether there was enough reflected light from the disc. Later machines had lasers that included an auto gain setup on the laser, to ensure that the correct level of reflectivity was presented to the quadrature sensor array on the pickup, or equivalent arrangement, this also explains the shorter life of some later lasers that drew higher current levels and therefore ran the laser brighter, especially when the optics got dusty or coated in tobacco smoke etc, I used to repair tons of CD players, love the things 🙂 RAFOCS and triple beam, Philips and Sony etc, Lots of other issues too of course, dried grease, warped rafoc arms, fragile plastics and adhesives… many are repairable though and too many cd players were condemned for bas lasers when actually the lasers were fine 🙂 Nice video Dave, glad you saved the lovely old Sony DVD player.

Let me guess so old that it it is actually NOT MADE IN CHINA but perhaps actually made in Japan a that would be impressive, and well worth your time to fix and get working.

I had the next model up, with the jog shuttle on the front panel, PAL model so it had RGB Scart out.
Apart from better picture quality than newer, supposedly fancier models, over HDMI or component, it had FANTASTIC analog audio out, it was the best sounding CD player i ever had. Strangely enough is seemed to like burnt CDs (blue tinted Verbatim Super Azo) better than originals. Unfortunately, I bought it third hand, the CD laser was tired when I got it and died a a few years later. I looked into replacing the pickup, but as the part was shared with a audiophile SACD player the prices were astronomical.

DVD wise it played almost anything i seem to recall, only no name generic Taiwan Dual Layers made it struggle, but those are trouble with pretty much anything that doesn't use a repurposed computer drive mechanism.

Good fix

Nice job. I've got the Sony DVP-S325 model, it has R,G,B scart out and coaxial + digital optical audio out. It also comes with s-video and rca/composite video – right/left audio out. Never really use it, but must get it going one of these days. Nice unit.

Dave, I have a Sony reel to reel with tubes I would like to send you to repair. Can you send me your email please? Thank you, James.

That was a funny one with single laser DVD pickups, where you couldn't read CD-Rs but you could read CD-RWs.

Never owned the DVP-S330, but I did own a DVP-S360. It was my second DVD player, which I traded up to from a Toshiba SD-1200.

The Sony was more responsive than the Toshiba, and the Sony's remote was better. But the Toshiba had a sharper picture with anamorphic downconversion compared to the Sony. Of course, in fairness, I never did watch anamorphic DVDs with the 4:3 downconversion on; I used my TV's 16×9 mode to get the best possible picture.

But, in retrospect, I should have gotten the Panasonic DVD-RV30. That machine was decently responsive and had a superior MPEG2 decoder compared to the Sony and the Toshiba. For one thing, it didn't have problems with chroma upsampling error. And I believe that model was much improved, reliability-wise, compared to the DVD-A110 and DVD-A120.

My goodness, I remember the DVD-A110 and just how often the pickups on those dropped like flies. Panasonic had to extend the warranty coverage to address the huge number of complaints on that model. And I also recall that the DVD-A100, which preceded the DVD-A110, wasn't any better.

One time in 2001, I was given a DVD-A110 for parts because it stopped reading discs. I took a chance with Panasonic customer care and they graciously took it in and replaced the optical pickup free of charge. It still worked when I eventually got rid of it, too.

Of course, a good quality modern Blu-Ray Disc player has decoding and picture processing for DVD-Video that blows those old dinosaurs out of the water.

About the only vintage DVD players I really want are the Technics DVD-A10, because it matches with the Technics SA-DA10 or SA-DA20 receivers, and the Sony DVP-S7000 and DVP-S7700 because the motorized drop-down front panel those models had is cool.

Dave, that battery was probably made by Matsushita. The date code should be in the negative side if this is true. 🙂

there's a bunch of these cluttering up my local thrift stores, want one?

That's a nice bonus! 😊

Great fix!

Thanks for the explanation of the differences between how each disk type is written / read.

that was a quick fix keep going

You can tell a dvd player is old when it contains the arrows and enter buttons on the faceplate.