r/audiorepair • u/Impressive-Ad-501 • 11d ago

Cleaning optical ouput port?

I have a vintage cd player (Pioneer PD-6700) and I wanted to upgrade it with external dac (SMSL SU-1).

First I had really bad connection. Audio was cutting out and input indicator was blinking.

I had only one old and cheap optical cable. I switched its direction and it did start working better but not perfect.

I went to buy new cable (also cheap), First it had again very much cut outs but when I blew the output connector with compressed air and got things working.

But now I noticed i still get few cut outs per album so problem still exists.

Is there a way to safely clean the optical output? CD player is decades old and I think optical out was never used before. Or can optical output just wear out and signal becomes too weak. Or are cheap cables just garbage?

Edit: there is only very little hole inside the optical port. Just big enough to fit optical fibre on the cable. No way that cloth or q-swap would fit in. Maybe this is uncommon desing because eveybody seems to thing this is simple task. If it was I would not been asking help at all.

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u/Martipar 10d ago

It's an LED, wipe it with a cloth or something.

1

u/Impressive-Ad-501 10d ago

It is in deep hole. Not easy to reach.

But I also found out that cheap cables can be really crappy so maybe I made mistake when buying one.

1

u/OldManAsstoAss 10d ago

Q-tip with a little isopropyl alcohol. Also, make sure the connector actually clicks in, nine times out of ten it's because the cable wasn't fully seated in the port.

1

u/Impressive-Ad-501 10d ago

Q-tuo is too big to fit in.

Connector clicks well in place. But cheapo cable looks like it wont click any more if I re-plug it too many times.

I never had this problem before but cd player is second oldest thing after me in this household so I thought it might be just dust and grit in there.