No sound!

Just as the going was good with a couple of 24kt Gold Searchers cd reissues that were part of a series of two discs containing their first four UK albums remastered arriving here, disaster struck.
I went to put the disc in the player and it made a few noises , said "No Disc" and stopped. Cleaning the lens that reads the disc didn't do nothing so my I thought the laser unit has gone upon a brief check by a service man was proved correct plus a display board low voltage rail issue causing overheating and the display to take ages to come on.
You see, the last time I bought a cd player for my stereo - a set of Hifi separates - was apparently March 13th 2003 which is ten years and  two weeks ago and apart from a celebrate instance when the drawer you place your cd on jammed once, this £350 NAD player had performed extremely well on regular and HDCD encoded discs, for once sounding close to my record playing systems quality on a decent disc (a rare thing to find on mainstream releases today but that's a whole other issue).
It had been a fit and forget feature of my stereo not being subject to irritating software upgrades of the sort you find with computers and blu-ray players. You just powered up, shoved a disc in and pressed play.
In the mean time I plugged an ancient cd player I had since the middle of 1986 that although getting rather long in the tooth, sounds rather sweet in to spin discs with while I consider looking for either a nice sounding used player or taking some money out of my savings for a new one. I'm also experimenting with a co-axial digital lead between the digital output of a dvd player and the digital input of my MiniDisc recorder using that to convert the naught and ones to analogue sound.