Really cheap player for tweaking and experimenting.

[Zero One]

I have had several CD and DVD players and last week I bought another one, a Tevion from Aldi for jsut $39.00, basically I bought it to use in the family room temporarily to replace our dead panasonic unit.

So just for interest I decided to hook it up to the music room system and play a CD, I expected the usual harsh highs, confused mids and muddy bass, that all the other DVD units I have had tried exhibited.......but it didn't sound like that at all.

For $39.00 it is amazing, the highs are smooth, the mids clear and the bass reasonable. Funny thing is that Dolby DVDs sound pretty ordinary while the CDs sound good, certainly not what I expected.

So I had a look inside, not much there, but actually quite solidy made, with a very neat main board. The drive is interesting as the chassis is alloy and not plastic like most I have seen but the tray is very flimsy plastic.

Overall I think it is a good cheap candidate for modding, so thats what I will do, the only problem is I would like to change the SMD output opamps but how does one remove them without wrecking things, or is it usually easier to just bypass them and build a seperate analogue output section. I've worked with smds before but this is very densley constructed.