Apex AD-1500 Left mono audio + no remote work :(

[kukyfrope]

I'm posting this in one of the more popular forums so maybe it will get seen...

My Apex AD-1500 recently started acting really weird. Audio on all SVCD/DVDs is only coming out of the Left channel of the TV and my remote does not work any longer. You may say "have you tried connections and a diff TV and diff cables and replacing batteries," and yes, I have or I would not be here :)

About 2 months ago I applied a region-free firmware and everything went just fine, everything still worked great. I actually just brought the player back for winter break from school, so it may have gotten damaged in transit, but I wonder if I didn't just wear it out or it went bad.

Anybody else experience these problems or have a possible solution?

[Kedirekin]

I haven't experienced this particular problem, but based on my experience with my AD-660, Apex players do have a tendency to wear out fast.

My player worked flawlessly for about a year. Then it started getting progressively more and more finicky about recognizing disks, and started experiencing playback problems (pixelation, blocking, audio drop outs). This was true for both SVCD (on CDR) and pressed DVDs, though it was less pronounced on DVDs. At first I could correct the problems by opening and closing the tray, but as time went by it required more and more ejects, and eventually reached the point where no amount of ejecting would fix it (at least, not a number of ejects I was willing to try).

Incidentally, I thought the laser was wearing out, but I swapped out the drive mechanism with a CD ROM drive (the 660 uses a standard IDE interface), and the intermittent recognition and playback problems continued (on SVCDs only of course). I'm pretty sure these problems weren't caused by incompatibility with the CD drive because it would often play back flawlessly (if I was willing to eject enough).

At the last, at about a year and a half, I put the original drive mechanism back in, but by that point the player simply wouldn't recognize anything. Oh, and the remote did stop working somewhere in there.

I don't know what the underlying cause of the failure was, but it was unlike anything I've ever experienced with a consumer electronics product before or since. The player's behavior baffles me to this day.

[kukyfrope]

I guess it can't hurt to buy another Apex model than the AD-1500. Was the first player I bought geared towards S/VCD/DVDR but from what I've heard, most Apex play all of those.