Can anyone make my Modwright XA777ES play SACD?

My sad tale is that I bought a used Modwright Sony XA777ES with full platinum mods, and it stopped playing SACDs about 18 months ago. It plays CDs beautifully.

Dan Wright, while a very nice guy, is too busy making new gear and doing new mods to fix it himself.

So I took it to a local audio repair place here in Portland Oregon, and they were useless. They kept it for four months, telling me the laser was backordered, then when I finally got it, it played CD's but not SACD's. After profuse apologies they kept it for another two months. This time it played SACDs for one day then it stopped playing them.

Now, when I put in an SACD, it does the following: It reads SACDs (takes forever) and plays them, but there's no audible output. The clock runs, the track display works, but there's no sound out the speakers or the headphones. Of course, it still plays CDs and sounds great playing them.

I'm not going back to Inner-so..(oops, almost mentioned the name of the local place that couldn't figure out in two tries over six months how to make it work...), and it still nags me that I have a handful of SACDs that I can't play, and it bothers me to walk past the SACD section of my local store (especially when people rave so hard about the medium).

So...anyone out there have any advice? Anyone know someplace that will fix a previously modded player without charging me an arm and a leg? I'm willing to ship it if I can get some sort of reasonable guarantee that it will work when I get it back. It has (I'm told) a new laser, but that didn't seem to be enough to make it work.

Two other options:

1. Forget SACD (I'm almost there. While the player was being held hostage, I re-surged into vinyl.)
2. Buy a new player - candidly, I'd rather upgrade my phono preamp from my current Tom Evans Groove to an ASR Basis Exclusive if I were going to invest bucks in the system.

Your thoughts?

Thanks in advance,

Rich