This invention relates to a disk player mounted on a vehicle with a centering mechanism which, in inserting a disk into the disk inserting opening thereof, operates to position the disk at the center of the disk inserting opening.
Recently, a compact disk has been developed which has a recording layer having pits corresponding to digital signals obtained by converting analog sounds (hereinafter referred merely as "a disk", when applicable). With the disk, analog sounds are optically reproduced by using a laser beam applied by the reading head of a CD (compact disk) player. The disk is much superior both in tone quality and in operability to conventional LP record disks. Hence, the compact disk together with its CD player has quickly come into wide use. Accordingly, DC players to be mounted on vehicles have been developed (hereinafter referred to as "vehicle disk players", when applicable). One example of the vehicle disk players is as shown in FIG. 1. In FIG. 1, reference numeral 101 designates a disk 12 cm in diameter in which pieces of music have been recorded. When the disk 101 is inserted into a disk inserting opening 102, it is conveyed to a predetermined position (which is substantially the center of the CD player) by a loading mechanism 103, where it is fixedly mounted on the turntable 105 by a clamper arm 104. The disk 101 thus mounted is rotated by a spindle motor (not shown), so that the pieces of music are reproduced with a reading head (not shown). In the vehicle CD player, the clamper arm 104, the turntable, and the reading head are supported in floating manner so that they are substantially free from vibration during traveling.
On the other hand, a disk 106 of 8 cm in diameter, which is much smaller in diameter than the disk 101 of 12 in diameter, has been proposed in the art.
The above-described conventional vehicle CD player suffers from the following difficulties: It is rather difficult to insert a disk into the disk inserting opening 102 at the middle, and therefore it is necessary to use the centering mechanism. Particularly it is difficult to insert the 8 cm disk into the disk inserting opening 102 at the middle, because the disk inserting opening 102 is large. If, in inserting the disk into the opening 102, it is shifted from the middle of the opening 102, then it is impossible to set the disk at the predetermined position on the turntable.
This difficulty may be eliminated by provision of the centering mechanism which moves the disk to the middle of the disk inserting opening if it is shifted therefrom. That is, the centering mechanism has a centering pin which, when a disk is inserted into the disk inserting opening, limits the shifting of the disk from the middle of the opening. The centering pin, located near the disk inserting opening, may result in the following difficulty: In the case where a 12 cm large disk 101 is mounted on the turntable 105, the centering pin and the disk 101 may collide with each other by vibration of the vehicle traveling.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds