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Hi Ed,
I don't have the CX box for the VP-1000. I found the unit at the Goodwill for $9.99 and was always a little curious about them, so I brought it home. To my surprise and pleasure, it worked great for the most part. A few days later, there was a box of about 50 discs at that same Goodwill, so I nabbed them up as well. After some obsessing on eBay, I'm now up to around 100 discs and will probably stop there.
It falters on a few discs towards the end, and not just the Discovisions which I hear had this problem. But it plays most discs flawlessly from start to finish. I know a guy who has the service manual and some of the jigs and gauges for it, but I'm not enough of a LD enthusiast to make the investment.
I was a little surprised that the programming on any given side ends without notice or warning, and simply starts again if you don't flip the disc over. And I never mess with the numeric keypad or explore any of the features, so I can't be sure the unit is fully functional - but it's a pretty cool thing to play around with. I do notice some snow and video noise on some discs, but not enough to really bother me.
If you don't mind, I might be picking your brain from time to time about these great JVC pro machines. My immediate question is whether they have some sort of circuit to ignore the anti-copy signal, as I don't seem to have any trouble at all copying movies from - well, anything! My uneducated guess is that they had to duplicate movies that were manufactured with the anti-copy signals, and thus needed to somehow bypass the protection.
Most of my other questions deal with using SMPTE time code, as there doesn't seem to be an introductory tutorial on its basic use. I'd like to sync 2 or more recording VCR's with Alesis ADAT machines so I can record local bands and myself playing, and have 16 tracks of audio - or 20+ tracks if you count the normal and Hi-Fi audio functions in the VCR's. I understand you need an Alesis BRC to translate the time code between the ADAT's and VCR's, but haven't gotten quite that far yet.
I do have 2 JVC editing controllers - the GR-800U and 860U, but I don't think they are of any use as far as the ADAT machines go. I'll do as much studying as possible before I bug you about the technical end of it. Nothing to bug you about on the VCR's, as I was able to get them all working with fairly simple mechanical fixes, and was able to confirm a bad video head (or something on the flying head preamp board) using a substitution signal from a VC93. Funny that I have pretty good head protrusion on the drum and no visible broken ferrite chunks, so possibly the preamp - but that's as far as I felt like going that day.
Very thankfully, generic pinch rollers are still available for the BR-S822U's and my S500's and S800's which appear to all use the same roller assembly. I'm curious about your warranty work on these - were there any certain common failures you had to fix on many machines? I work in Avionics these days, and most of our "warranty work" is the pilot not knowing how to use the equipment, or something else in the aircraft malfunctioning and making it look like the culprit. Or more likely, the designers trying to pack more and more performance into smaller boxes, and the fact that it's a harsher electronic environment behind the yoke than in the circuit simulation software!
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