Apex AD-1500 Stopped working

[moosebanna]

I am pretty sure my cheap but awesome (was) Apex AD-1500 is deceased. I tried playing a dvd that was giving me problems in my Philips system - which happens with some burned dvds. And it was having troubles reading. Then after trying other normal dvd's it kept spinning saying no disc. I do recall putting a firmware hack years ago when I got it.

I looked at the laser component, and used some alcohol and q-tip to clean it. If anything it made the situation worse. Now it barely tries to spin and read the disc, and keeps saying no disc. I think the system is done with, but was reaching out here to see if anyone else might know a few tricks to salvage the thing. Now I will need something that can play everything like this one. I don't see it being sold anymore at stores. For that matter any Apex. What happened? Thanks

[Shaky Jake]

You might try here:

http://www.nerd-out.com/darrenk/index.htm

http://www.nerd-out.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=1

[wulf109]

You can still find them on ebay. I bought one in mint condition for $24.95 recently.

[jman98]

Apex was started by a Chinese immigrant who was living in the USA. He did his manufacturing in China and shipped the players from there. A couple of years ago he went to China on business and got arrested by the government on some sort of tax charges. I don't know enough about the situation to know who is right, but he claims that he was arrested because he didn't pay enough bribes to the right officials, not because of any real tax issues. He has been stuck in prison for quite a while now. It appears that the only way to buy anything from Apex at this time (other than buying used stuff on Ebay) is to buy straight from them at http://www.shop-apex.com.

I was a big Apex fan too. I bought a couple of their DVD players and they were fine units in their day, but the cheap Philips DVP-642 I bought 2 years ago was much cheaper and in some ways a better player than what I got from Apex. So Apex may more or less be gone, but there are other good, cheap DVD players out there.

[lordsmurf]

Lasers die, and Apex has never been a maker of high quality players. Just cheap ones that were easy to hack. Cyberhome and LiteOn are the "new Apex" these days, for players and recorders (respectively).

[moosebanna]

Thanks for all the input. I am going to see if I can swap out the drive with an old dvd burner unit. We shall see. Later

[wulf109]

Early AD-1500's used a standard IDE computer drive. If it uses an IDE drive it's serial number will begin with the letters SV. If you have one of those practically any DVD-ROM drive could subbed. Later production used a non-IDE drive and are very difficult to replace.