UPDATE: success
opened up my d50mkII which had been not playing. i knew there was power getting through the machine, as the lcd would briefly show '00' and then turn off, and there was some whining/grinding sound coming from the transport, although no spinning whatsoever.
everything was clean inside - the thing is built very solid and whoever owned it kept good care of it.
removed the 'upper' (really lower, but i had the thing upside down) PCB to expose the inner PCB with the pots. located 4 pots, correllated their labels roughly with the descriptions given elsewhere on this site, and started tweaking. i used the daredevil style of playing the disc while everything was open (it even played while upside down), and got it to an acceptable level of non-skippiness. it still skips when tapped, so there is room for improvement, but right now i am just happy the thing works.
i don't have enough listening practice to have golden ears, but it sounds nice to me. i briefly played a cd of test tones last night, and through the HP-out it covers the low end fine, seems to start rolling off at 40-60 Hz, but it will play 20Hz softly. the extreme upper end suffers from noise or distortion though. i expect the lineout handles it better, but my portapros didn't have any sound from the lineout last night so i couldn't test it.
my grado 60's are plenty loud through the lineout, however. almost too loud, for in-office listening anyway.
hope this is informative to someone.
/andrew
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