laser realignment and/or calibration, necessary? price?

[drewson99]

I am getting some questionable DVD burns out of my A05 (about 1500+ burns on this drive) and it will no longer burn a proper CD at all.

how much does a calibration/cleaning cost, and where would I find this service?

If it is under $50-$60, I'd rather clean up this drive than buy a new one.

-A

[garryheather]

Talk about a specialist job...

The last recorder I had any dealings with required a specific test disc, a drive exerciser to simulate traffic on the IDE bus and put the optical block in the right place in order to do the measurement, and an optical power meter.

Unless you've got all that to hand, I'd say it's new drive time if that is really what is at fault. It is very rare for the optical block to become out of allignment to a point where the drive can not recalibrate, but if you've dropped it, used commercial cleaners in it or attacked the block with a cotton bud soaked in vodka then you might be right in what is wrong with it.

Either way, the labour charges alone would probably write the drive off.

[drewson99]

... used commercial cleaners in it ... you might be right in what is wrong with it.

I have used a lens cleaner on it.

Is that unwise?

It is a scotch CD with tiny hairlike brushes that stick out un the underside.

anyone else have opinions about these cd lens cleaners?

-Andy

[garryheather]

Generally speaking, people in the biz don't recommend commercial cleaners like the ones you describe.

Firstly, the optical block in a recorder is different to the average block in a playback only device. Those cleaners are designed to "knock off" dust, which generally speaking doesn't accumulate in drives. I have, in all my years, only had to clean one optical block on a professional deck, and that was because the user had it at head height and was a heavy smoker.

Those "brushes" can scratch the lens, and can theoretically push the head out of allignment. I've posted here before how you should clean a lens, and rotating brushes simply are not it. Lenses are designed to wobble, and then these brushes come along and force the head in a direction it was never ment to go in repeatedly and at speed.

In fact, some manufacturers now state on their drives NOT to use commercial cleaners.

I see so many posts here saying "clean the lens", and it makes my flesh crawl ! These posters keep my computer peripheral engineer colleagues in business !

[johns0]

I work on dvd/cd units and it would take a hell of a strong brush to either knock a lens out of alignment or scratch it,brushes which are coarse might scratch but most are horsehair type.

[garryheather]

The issue is usually more a case of where the dust winds up when it's pushed off the lens. If it goes down the gap between the lens and the housing, it can cause all manner of problems, mainly that the lens does not return back to its usual position, or starts to gunk up the grease in the gearing mechanism.

The lens in particular won't like to be fouled - there is only a certain amount of "bounce" there, and if it encounters any resistance the focusing can go to pot big time. A brush hitting the side of the lens and moving debris around in such a confined space is not a good idea when tolerances are so tight.

Plus I've pulled a "brush" out of an optical block before now... needless to say that wasn't a warranty repair as foreign objects are considered misuse.

[tommyoz]

I have, in all my years, only had to clean one optical block on a professional deck, and that was because the user had it at head height and was a heavy smoker.

How did you clean it? and with what?

[garryheather]

I posted a better description a while ago, but I'm too lazy to search any further than this post - but what the hell, you will no doubt get the idea.

https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=177858&highlight=cleaning+lens

I will just say I have an old 2x CD writer that is still in use after what must be knocking on for nearly a decade, and I've never had to clean that out. I've never had to clean my A04 in what must be about 2 years, nor any of my DVD-ROM's CD-ROM's or other such optical media. I am always sceptical of people who have to keep cleaning their equipment - they must be eating their dinner off of the discs or something to get that much dirt into a player. The damn things are pretty much sealed unless you leave the tray open in order to use it as a cup holder or the like...

[JohnnyCNote]

For some reason my Sony DRU-500A is sensitive to dust, or at least appears to be. If I get a burn error, I give it a blast of canned air and it seems to cooperate after that. I know there is a lot of debate and pro's and con's, but it works. I've also used cleaning disks. I'd prefer not to open it if I can avoid it. It seems no matter which method you use, there are potential pitfalls.

I've never had to do this with my other drives, however. In any event, I'm going to upgrade to an 8x drive in a week or so, so it will be a moot point. The guy who's agreed to buy it can worry about it. He's a neatness nut so he shouldn't have so much problems with dust....

[jeremyp969]

For some reason my Sony DRU-500A is sensitive to dust, or at least appears to be. If I get a burn error, I give it a blast of canned air and it seems to cooperate after that.

This could also be a heat issue. The faster the drive is running the hotter it's getting and if you don't have proper circulation will overheat. When you shoot the compressed air in the compressed air is of course cold and it might just be cooling the drive down. Next time before trying the compressed air give it like 10 minutes to cool down and see if that fixes it. Or try moving the drive to a position where it will cool better. Or maybe it is dust

[Alan69]

Lens cleaning is fine if you do it even remotely correctly. Do check for foreign objects though a hair could always come off and block the voice coils from moving the head correctly.

There is no alignment to knock out in any modern drive. The slide and the voice coils are both servo controlled to find the data tracks. A drive circuit could always go bad etc and not let it find the data, but there is no static alignment to knock out it is all dynamic. That's why most readers with no disc will slide across the entire area looking for the disc. They don't go to a certain place and look, they scan everywhere. You can't knock dynamic alignment out of alignment. It's a necessary function to follow the very small and close tracks on a CD or DVD. Even the burners are largely dynamic, there is a pattern in the disc to burn by. While it has to find the start and tracking, it does the alignment dynamically. Look on the bottom of an unburned disc surface, there is the flat ring with text, then unburned media, then a thin preburned ring to align by before starting the burn. That is found dynamically, if it relied on a static alignment inside the drive there would be no reason for that ring at all, you just move to the right place and start burning. It's dynamic though, and you need the ring to find where 'there' is to start the burn.

This is almost guaranteed to be a laser LED aging issue. Any high powered LED ages much faster than standard LEDs. Any one may last much longer than another, and something like a 2X speed CD drive as someone suggested takes much less power to burn so could easily last near forever. A 2X or 4X DVD is like a fast CD burner, it takes plenty of power. The laser LED is why these things come with only a 1 year waranty instead of a lifetime one in the first place. And 1500 discs is probably 5 years plus of what the majority of people with this drive will do. At that burn rate you should be realizing that the drives themselves will be a consumable item to you anyway, and be amazed that that one was actually good enough to last that long in the first place. Many drives would have experienced some other failure long before reaching 1500 burns.

Could easily still be something else, and the laser might last to 3000 discs if you could fix it, so worth checking out a bit for simple things to fix. But it's around 60% likely to be the laser is done for, and 40% any other problem, and probably only 10% of that 40% are simple and easy enough to be worth trying to fix.

Also don't be so attached to your drive. As everything they've come way down since you likely bought this, $50 or $60 to repair this would be silly vs a new one for around that price or an 8X for $120ish. You can get new or very lightly used A05's off Ebay for $60 or less, it'd be crazy to repair that one and still have an old heavily used drive. They aren't printers from 1980, so like most everything else they aren't made to last forever any more.

Alan

[garryheather]

There is no alignment to knock out in any modern drive. The slide and the voice coils are both servo controlled to find the data tracks

Correct to a degree, however my point is the "wobble" on the lens is provided by very thin wires / coils / springs / luck (!) as you describe, but if you're bullish with your cleaning procedure then you can push the lens out of that focusing window. It only has a finite amount of movement, and if you've pushed it permanently out of whack, no amount of hunting on the behalf of the recorder will be able to compensate for that. The tolerances are so damn tight these days just whacking one down hard on a bench top can knock one out of the pre-manufactured allignment window. Hard drives park, lenses don't !

The same goes for my earlier remark about jamming up the optical block - if you get an obstruction between the lens and its encapsulation, you limit the amount of movement in there and its response time. The comulative effect is poor tracking and focusing errors. The allignment may be made dynamically, but it is only designed to combat tolerances in media, not 1lb PSI and the plastic shaft of a cotton bud !