[slinkelist] Sony CX-270 woes

[Ron Tugender]

Making a CX-270 work with CDJ/Slink-e is certainly a chore!  I sent my
CX-270 to Sony for a repair after it had built up an imposing list of
problems (forgetting loaded CDs, going into incessant "spins" through the
carousel, etc.) and just got it back.  The repair center replaced its
C-board (main logic board) which is about the most extensive repair that
doesn't affect the changer mechanism.  So, logical function wise, it's about
as new as it can be.

First the good news.  The problems I've had getting artist, title and track
memos loaded from CDJ onto the CX-270 have ceased, now working flawlessly
for a collection of about 145 disks.  I've never been able to get more than
about a half-dozen slots worth of memo data loaded before the CDJ/270 dialog
would get out of whack and CDJ would start writing garbage over the memo
areas.  I've done 3 successful loads, one of about 130 disks worth, all
correctly.  That's a big step up.

On the downside, I notice that the CX-270, which is slaved to a CX-350, will
still get into an "endless seek" mode where the carousel will spin and spin,
and the CX-270 will be pretty much unresponsive to CDJ until I manually hit
the STOP button on the CX-270 front panel.  I don't know what prompts these
episodes, but I've read sprinkles of other users' comments that slaving a
CX-270 to a CX-3xx is a troublesome combination because of S-link command
"competition" between CDJ and the CX-350.  Users' comments suggest that the
CX-270 and CX-350 be connected to separate Slink-e ports to eliminate this
competition.  I've previously resisted doing the separate Slink-e
connection, because then the CX-350 would lose its ability to control the
CX-270 in manual operation.

To see if it would resolve the "endless seek" problem on the CX-270, I
disconnected the CX-270 from the CX-350 and plugged it directly into a
separate Slink-e port instead.  Upon restart, CDJ immediately recognized the
CX-270 on the separate port and all seemed otherwise ready to go.  But when
I attempted to play music from the CX-270, no sound came out.  I have the
CX-270's audio outputs daisy-chained through the CX-350 so they can come
into my amplifier through a single CD input, so it appears that when the
CX-350 does not "see" the CX-270 as a slave on the S-link bus, it will not
pass through the daisy-chained audio output from the CX-270.

Does this sound familiar to other users who daisy-chain Sony changers?  Is
there a way to play music from a "slaved" player if the audio outputs are
daisy-chained but the S-link controls are not?

Thanks,
Ron