General Electronic and Video Repair Venues

Locating Electronic and Video Equipment Repair Services

This page offers some suggestions on searching for businesses that provide repair on electronic equipment. Many CED collectors have expressed interest in finding a local firm that will repair their CED player. Unfortunately, I can't offer any specific suggestions on this due to having no experience seeking repair on CED players either locally or across the country. But your player may only require a tune-up rather than circuit level electronic repair, in which case tune-up providers listed on the Related Sites page should be able to get it operating again.

Because of the age of CED players, electronic repair that may have been a routine matter back in the 1980's could be a difficult proposition in the present day. RCA and other player manufacturers were legally required to provide repair parts for only seven years after player production ended, so OEM repair parts gradually started to disappear around 1990. Due to the nature of custom integrated circuit failure, the chips most likely to fail are also the ones for which the industry supply may already be exhausted. This presents a dilemma for service providers, as they may spend a couple hours determining the specific problem only to discover the repair requires a non-standard part that is no longer available from industry distributors. At that point the only options are to remove the item from a parts machine or possibly obtain it from some of the CED specialists listed on the Related Sites page. So you may find a facility willing to diagnose a CED player, but you may be told that repair cannot be guaranteed, and that an hourly fee will be assessed even if repair is not possible.

I have two suggestions for locating possible repair facilities. The first is to post a message to CED Forum stating the geographic area where you live, and asking if anyone on the mailing list knows of a local repair facility or person. There are Forum subscribers across the United States as well as in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, so someone in your local area may be able to offer some suggestions.

My second suggestion is to call repair facilities in your local phone directory, asking them if they can repair CED players or know of any other facility or individual person who can provide this service. Make sure you explain that the repair is for a SelectaVision CED VideoDisc player from the early 1980's, as they may be completely unfamiliar with CED and think you're talking about DVD.

Depending on your local phone directory, repair facilities may be listed under a number of alphabetical categories in the book. Here are some of the possibilities:

Electronic Equipment & Parts - Retail or Service
Electronic Equipment & Supplies Repairing
Electronic Equipment & Supplies - Service & Repair
Hi-Fi Equipment - Service
Stereo & Hi-Fi - Repair & Parts
Stereo Equipment - Sales & Service
Stereo Equipment Repair & Service
Stereophonic & High Fidelity Equipment - Service
Video Equipment & Supplies Repair & Service
Video Equipment - Repairs & Service
Video Equipment - Service & Repair
Video Equipment Sales, Rentals & Service
Video Recorders & Players - Service Repair

Here are some web sites where you may search for the above categories by City/State within the United States. Note that you generally need to type only the first word of the category to get a listing from which the exact match can be picked:

And here are some directories for the other countries where CED players could be purchased:

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