Some problems regarding the Sc5000 player

Hello. I’m a new owner of a Sc5000. I must say that I love it, but unfortunately it didn’t take long for me to notice some problems, so I was thinking about asking here before I head for the tech support.

  1. Audio and lights stuttering. Completely out of blue my player will start to stutter. It doesn’t matter whether I’m playing tracks or not - the light around the platter will start to blink in white (sort of if I was touching the platter lightly and rapidly) and, if I’m playing a track, the audio will come out as glitchy. The player being such a massive unit, my first thought was that it was a power problem, but the problem persisted even after dedicating it it’s own socket.

  2. Weird audio quality. Any audio that comes out of this player seems poses a much stronger bass than it should. I was comparing the sound of a WAV track with the very same track on vinyl and even while it sounds fine at first, the clarity could be described as laughable comparing to the vinyl since it seems to me that the bass more or less shadows the other frequencies. Of course I made sure to plug the outputs into different mixer inputs and made sure eq was on zero, I even tested both layers, but the problem persisted.

If anyone has encountered those problems and solved them without much of a hassle, I would highly appreciate the shared solution. As many times (at least in my experience), it probably is just a minor fix that I can’t figure out.

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Hello and welcome to the forum!

Reply to 1: Have you taken the foil of the platter?

Reply to 2: Have you updated the unit to the latest firmware 1.3.1?

Also, is the power you’re plugging into properly grounded?

Thank you.

Yes, I did it soon after unboxing. The platter functions normal and the problem will appear random. Sometimes an hour would pass without any problems, sometimes it will appear after 5 minutes of turning the player on.

And yes, I did that as well.

Do have a second unit and does that have the same issues?

Otherwise contact support or reseller, I guess.

  1. Sounds like you have a grounding problem. Make sure the players are on a grounded electrical line and make sure you aren’t developing static electricity on your body, such as from carpet. When the unit boots up, keep your hand away from the platter. If you are generating a charge on your body, after the unit has completely booted (or maybe while it’s booting?) try touching the ground screw in the right rear of the unit. The current platter ring LED behavior does make this tricky to ID. This feature request will help with at least identifying when it is a touch platter problem:

https://community.enginedj.com/t/change-in-scratch-led-ring-function-recommended-on-touch-version-of-sc5000/

  1. The sound quality of Prime, the players in particular, still needs some work. The recent firmwares slightly improve high frequency playback extension, but there are other issues with the core digital signal processing besides that. The DAC sections they used on Prime are supposed to be excellent AKM stuff, so hopefully the analog out hardware is fine. Not so sure how good the SPDIF hardware quality is, but hopefully most of the sonic issues are just code related that can be further improved in firmware, but it does warrant an overhaul, IMO. This feature request will help with this:

https://community.enginedj.com/t/improve-audio-processing-quality/

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