Is it bad to put a CD-player or turntable in storage? Do they suffer from not being used, like a mechanical watch that should be set in motion from time to time? Reason I ask, I have more working CD-players than I need but lack the shelf space to keep them in use. I want to keep them as backup though. Of course I would store them cool, dry and dust-free, that's not the problem.
CD players should be fine - no real issues I can think of. Turntables might be a different proposition. For example, if it's a belt drive deck the belt may perish. You also want to be super safe with moisture, because you don't want anything buckling the plinth. I'd remove the cartridge and platter. Make sure the tonearm is secure.
I think it depends where you live in regard to turntables. I would remove belt and keep it in a warm part of the home If its a suspended turntable remove platter Power up.once a month. Cd player again with electronics keep In the warmth and power up say once a month They both seem to survive despite Poor storage.
CD players also can have a belt. While those belts can degrade just sitting there, and only refrigerating them could slow the chemical reactions and separations of plasticizers, even well-formulated components, being also stretched and left for a long time can also cause them to deform, imprinting a memory of the pulleys they are wrapped around, until the belt would rather slip than deform from that position and eject the CD tray, or will wow and flutter rather than give up its new shape. I wouldn't recommend undertaking a regimen for regular exercise, as the ultimate solution for the faults you could prevent may be just to re-position the belt and let it warm up once.
Personal experience with long term cd player storage (over a year) tells me you'll be fine. The only problem I had with any of my players was a sticky drawer on one for it's first opening in a couple years.
Donate to charity or ebay the stuff and keep only what you use. Seems more of a hoarding than a storage problem to me.
I stored a very nice Sony ES cassette deck for years. Decided to fire it up and it was DOA. Made a screaming noise! I'm sure it could have been repaired but my interest in reviving the format didn't go that far. Don't store anything in the garage or on it's side like I did I guess.
Pretty much anything electro-mechanical is probably going to have belts. The drawer motor on CD players, the pinch rollers on cassette decks, and of course turntables. All of them will deteriorate. There isn't much you can do about it beyond storing them in the environment the manual recommends using them in (average room humidity and temperature.) Plugging them in and running them once a month, or once every couple of months, will help more than anything. If you try to run something and hear a loud screeching noise, that's probably a deteriorated belt wrapped around a motor spindle. Bad news is someone needs to open it up and fix it. Good news is, depending on the device, it's pretty easy to do, and you can buy replacement belt sets that have nearly every conceivable sized belt for $10 on Amazon. In my experience, CD players are the easiest, and most cassette mechanisms, while not difficult, are more time consuming, as you have to snake belts through various mechanisms with tweezers.
Thanks for all the answers! If it's only the belt of the drawer opening mechanism I don't worry. I believe I could replace that on my own.
Two things: first of all I am pro-hoarding and hope to one day get rich with a book called Magic Hoarding. Second of all, build quality of CD players is not getting better. The art of building a good player may be forgotten soon, like it was with cassette decks. So I won't give away any of my precious CD players. And it's only four of them.
Here's forum member VWestLife fixing a compact shelf system CD player, if you would like an idea of what's involved:
