snip

He was in fact quite nice and
told me to take the cover off and clean the lens carefully.


So have you ??


It was THEN that I noted the problem which I described to you all, which
is that the clamp holds the DVD in place and something starts to run the
spinner on the DVD and when something or other doesn't engage, it gives up
and pretends to move on to the next DVD which does the same. Ultimately it
gives up on moving on and realises that the servo isn't moving the DVD as
I mentioned in OP.

I had thought obviously wrongly that is was a standard carousel mechanism
which was subject to the standard problems which could be easily repaired
by someone without much technical knowledge by tightening some cog or
other or replacing some belt.

It would seem that you are completely misunderstanding the sequence of
events which lead to a disc being played, and the term 'servo'. There is no
such item as a "spinner" in a DVD or CD player. I assume that you are
meaning that the disc starts to be rotated by the spindle motor, having been
correctly clamped to the turntable, but that the loading process does not
proceed on from there, resulting in the player rotating the carousel to have
a try at the next position. All this means is that the laser does not manage
to read anything that it can make sense of, from the initial spinup of the
disc, so it assumes that there is no disc at that position on the carousel.

In view of the fact that you seem to not understand the workings of these
players, then I think that your eforts will have to be confined to cleaning
the lens, as both the man at Onkyo and myself suggested to you, or accept
that the laser is faulty, as both Mark and myself have told you.

Arfa