I have a Sony 5-disc carousel CD player that is about 8 years old. Last Christmas time I thought I noticed a good deal of distortion when playing CDs. Then, sort of went away. Same thing this year, which leads me to believe that heat is affecting the player. It is in an area (due to space limitations) that gets on the warm side when our heat kicks in.
My questions is this: how exactly should heat affect my player??? It is hooked up using standard RCA cables to my AV receiver. Will the heat affect the DAC converters and cause the degradation of the sound? Will it affect the laser and how it reads the bits?

If it does not really affect the laser itself and is something else such as the DACs, then I was thinking of trying to get an (inexpensive, since the player is old anyway) optical cable to connect to the receiver and bypass the players DACs and pass the pure stream to the AV receivers DAC converters.

What do you folks think? I am confident that it is the heat since it only reoccurs when we are in heating season.

Thanks ahead of time for your thoughts and help!

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