Philips CD880: Buttons unresponsive

One of Philips flagships… the CD880 with an impressive selected DAC chip: TDA1541A S1 (Single Crown).

Its malfunction is that most switches on the front don’t work anymore and that open/eject is functioning erratically. Another thing is that the lightbulbs for the illuminated bars need to be replaced.

The CD open/close issues are caused by very bad conductance of the switches indicating the position of the drawer. An easy cleanup solved this issue.

The same is the case on most of the operation buttons on the front panel. These have very high resistance when pushed in all the way.
First is to disassemble the player and disconnect the front panel.

Next is to disassemble the front panel

Eject switch and left site light bulb.


Display needs cleaning, so that can be don as well.


The glue of the red display filter came loose.

Bug check: failed

Found a bug in the cd player… a real one but it had died a long time ago.

 

So there are a lot of switches on the front PCB, several measured high resistance.
Best solution is to replace all those switches.

I bought a bag of those. The height of the switches is very important. This cd player requires the lowest button height of 4.3 mm.

The desoldering iron, flux, cutting pliers and flat screwdriver and piece by piece the PCB lost their faulty switches.

After a lot of work the new switches were in and all was working again.

 

9 comments on “Philips CD880: Buttons unresponsive

  1. Hi, If you still own the 880 & player still has the blue Philips capacitors in (radial & axial), I would strongly advise you to renew them, they are renowned for loss of uf & high esr with age.

    • Hi Simon,

      Thank you for you reply.
      The CD880 was brought in for repairs. The owner only requested to get the cd-player fixed.
      Especially the blue Philips axial capacitors are known for loss of capacity over the years.
      If I had owned this cd-player I would certainly have done a full recap and perhaps a few other modifications.

      Kind regards, Mark

  2. super, where u find bulb for the cd880? can say me dimension of them, i also need to replace them 😀

    • Hi Marco,

      The dimensions of the light bulbs are approximately 4mm x 10mm. I’ve tried some 6v 40mA from AliExpress, they actually measured 6v 65mA, but worked perfectly fine on the -6V with a series diode in the CD880. To me the amount of light is pretty much identical to the original light bulbs.
      You will have to reuse the blueish colored covers. I used some silicone spray to get them off the old bulb and to slide them back on the new ones. WD40 might also work, but it could become smelly if the lights are on for a while.

  3. Great job, wonderful pics, marvellous craftmanship put in building of that machine. A joy for the eye (and for the ear I am sure).

    • Hi mrx,
      Thank you very much. It is indeed a really nice machine, very well build and sounds great. I’m very happy with the sound of my Philips CD950 with the famous bitstream D/A converter TDA1547 (DAC7). So I’ve only fixed this machine and returned it to the owner.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *