Repairing a NAD 502 CD Player
My trusty NAD 502 CD Player, which I bought in 1996 from Richer Sounds, developed a fault a few months ago. The display went completely dark, so although it would play CDs perfectly, it was tricky to operate. Luckily it was not a failure of anything more complex than the backlight, which turns out to be a couple of wire-ended small capsule lamps. This CD player has a fantastic specification and had great reviews at the time, so I was not in a hurry to dump it for a newer model just for the sake of some tiny and cheap lamps in the display. This really is built-in obsolescence because any incandescent lamp will eventually burn out, and these are not even replaceable without soldering. I suppose it was a cheap option at the time, and maybe the design life of the CD player wasn't more than 10 years. To last 23 years is doing well in consumer electronics. NAD can be forgiven for not using white LEDs since they didn't exist until 1996 or so and were very expensive at that time. Instead of just replacing them with the same capsule lamp, for example part number 606-CM7220 from Mouser,…
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