Dustin
While touring a relative's house for the first time, we came across a closet full of really cool older stereo equipment. In there was this old 400 disc CD player from the year 2000. I used to have a 300 disc version when I was younger and loved it. I asked if I could buy this from them. He said to take it home, and if it works, pay him for it later. I got it home, and found it had a "Loading Error" and another error I can't quite recall. Both were caused by degraded drive belts. I was able to get it working well enough to justify ordering new belts, but not until after I'd experimented with making custom temporary belts for testing. So far it has been shuffling between about 70 discs, for multiple days. Aside from my temporary belts failing, it has done just fine and earned a restoration and many more years of service. Playing with it has inspired another project that I would thoroughly enjoy: 300 disc 4k Blu Ray PC drive for ripping, burning, and playing back large collections of various discs.
After getting the player fully working, and replacing the missing remote, the plan is to play around with it. The plan is to hook it to my PC with an optical audio cable over USB and use Icecast to stream it's output over the internet so I can listen to my CD collection at work. I may also emulate an IR remote that I could control over the internet so I can control the player remotely as well. There is no practical reason to do such a thing, but it would be fun and interesting.
Currently it is hooked to a soundbar over optical audio. I'll be getting an optical splitter so the player can be hooked to the soundbar, my wireless headphone transmitter, and my PC all at once for many listening options. I've found that having a dedicated physical media player has had a serious positive effect on my life. I press 3 buttons and have an endless stream of all of my favorite music, which motivates me to get up and do something. It's basically a private jukebox in my home. There is a long delay between tracks when changing discs, but I find I don't notice it after a while. These players can actually be connected together to shuffle tracks between multiple players and eliminate gaps by queuing up a track on one player before the other gets to the end of a track. These players were pretty advanced and are still very interesting to this day. You can add the currently playing track to a "Hit List" with a single button press, and remove with another. I find this very useful when I just want to make a list of my favorites. Overall, this CD player has been a fantastic addition to my physical media collection and life.
Chris Low
I have the identical changer. I've had it for several years.
With it I also purchase the SAVR interface by BlackBoxDesigns which allows me to control the changer via the control-i slink interface using RS232 (remember that technology). I also have both the windows and the linux versions of Michael C McCain's Music Library software which works well with my setup.
I have just brought all of this STUFF out of storage to load up all my Christmas music for the coming season. It will be good to hear a lot of it again.
I kind of like having the old CD Changer and I need to string some optical connections to a couple of receivers.
Going forward I would really like to see someone create a proper IP interface to control the CDP400 via the slink system. I think an ESP32 or even a Raspi Zero would do the job nicely.
I have a spare intel NUC that has an installed RS232 interface that I plan on using for now just to get everything going again.
The SAVR has a custom programmed PIC controller to do the job and unfortunately the two brothers that sold them are no longer in business.
So many things are going retro these days and I would be really glad to be able to breath fresh light into the old CDP400 again.....
Thanks for posting this and I look forward to more of your adventures. If you are looking for interface data for this I have a lot of it that I collected over the years. PM me if you are interested.
Glenn.