So I’ve been trying to persuade myself to work on the tax relief form, thing is, it was tedious finding the information the first time around, and while I may berate myself for not having kept a copy of it (although I may have, and have filed it somewhere odd), I frankly am pissed that they lost it. And am a little miffed at having to fill it it in again.
At any rate, I went and got the address and name of the person I need to send it to (a specific person with an actual name and an address). And then the Left channel cut out on the HiFi.
It’s been doing this more and more of late, and while I’d initially put it down to a grubby connector – the state the volume control was in gave me that idea, while I was trying to coax it into working today another option occured.
Excuse the quality:
And after some stripping down and peering through the gap I realised that I was right to be suspicious. The speaker connectors are mounted on the board and their little legs provide a goodly chunk of the mechanical strength to hold them to the back of the case and the board. I can’t say I’m surprised, modern ‘engineering’ is such that people seem to think that solder is an adequate means of attaching things – I was always told this is terrible practice because solder isn’t very flexible, and once you’ve wiggled the joint around a bit, the joint breaks down, and you end up with a very intermittent connection.
I’ve had quite a few pieces of equipment that have come my way after this sort of fault. And it turned out that this was again the fault here – a small subtle crack around one of the left channel’s connectors. So I resoldered it, and then looked at the board and thought, y’know, that bit doesn’t look very healthy…
It does appear to be getting ‘quite warm’. So after some internal discussion I decided to continue my procrastination and pulled the board out entirely, and I’m glad I did, because most of the connectors on that ‘very warm’ bit of board weren’t really soldered anymore. Their solder had overheated and though it was probably connecting a bit, I wouldn’t want to guarantee those connections.
To be fair, I’m not sure I want to guarantee those components either – they look like they’ve got a bit toasty warm – although none of them seem to be *specifically* the one that’s got toasty warm. Which is odd. Maybe they’ve just always been ropey connections.
Anyhow, now that we have reliable stereo audio, I can get back to tax forms…
