So my faithful old Receiver seems to have died.

It was playing away when it locked up (which is does at times, but not overly often). I went over and unplugged it to reboot and...nothing. After waiting the requisit 10 seconds or so from plugin the power button does nothing.

So I swear a bit and play around with power cords and outlets to make sure it's getting power. No go.

So I then open it up. Reseat the power supply connectors. Still nothing, though I notice that the LED on the main board starts blinking as soon as I plug it in.

I decide to pull out and look at the power supply, as it is the easiest thing to get to, there seem to be more than one voltage worth of wires going to it, and people have mentioned it being flaky in the past. There are a pretty huge number of really crappy solder joints on the board, and a few (apparently) filter caps which visably move around when i apply any pressure to them. (I cannot recommend Ilan products.) Reheat the visably bad joints, all the while trying to avoid shorting out the big cap in the middle (which I didn't want to figure out how to discharge). Manage to reheat everything I wanted to without bumping it, re assemble everything, and...still nothing. Grr.

So then I reseat the amp board. Nothing.

Pull the front panel off and poke around there a while. Neat thing, manage to get it back together again without breaking the display (not easy, that), but still no luck. And while it was open I forgot to remove the clear plastic overlay that makes the display even harder to read (this is a Rio version of the player), darnit. Oh well.

So now I'm stuck. I don't really want to build a level converter to look at any possible serial port output, expecially when I don't know if it's even booting far enough to put anything out there.

Anyone have any suggestions? I'd like to rescue it if I can.

I'm close to ordering a SqueezeBox as a replacement. I already use SlimServer to stream to the RIO (I found just leaving the rio pointed at the slimserver stream and having SS do selection and transcoding to be much more stable than any of the rio client softwares I tried), so I might as well support their development effort. However, doing so also means I have to buy a seperate amp, which is annoying, since I use the thing in my bedroom, where an extra gizmo and associated remote seems excessive.

Little update...

The problem indeed appears to be in the power supply. The rio will boot and work normally when powered by an ordinary ATX power supply (though the sound quality suffers greatly).

My meter shows that the PS puts out ~14.5v without a load, but drops to ~3v with the rio's logic board connected. Web research shows that power supplies based on the controller chip this one uses can fail in a way that causes them to cycle on and off as they try to start up. This would explain the blinking of the logic board's LED...which is constant lit when attached to a working power supply. The blinking is the power supply comming up to power but then shutting back off when the controller chip doesn't see any power from the output side of things.

Careful examination of the PS board has revealed that C15 (a surface mount capacitor) is chipped (as is visable, somewhat, in these pictures http://jupiter.okb-1.org/camera/public/RioBrokenPS/ ). I'm not sure if this is the cause of the problem or just collatoral damage caused by whatever else has failed.

As I can't find any markings on the capacitor in question, and don't have SMT soldering equipment, I am now looking around for a cheap but audio quality 12v power supply.

It's nice to at least know that the problem is indeed the power supply.

I would get an external supply, run that in the receiver and place some nice caps where the old power supply used to be. That should do. If you want to go fancy, add a regulator such as 78xx, just get a power supply that has more than 15V.

Update:

My receiver is now back in action. The Boeing Surplus people sold me a 12v 3.3amp HP laptop power supply for $5. A little dremel work later (for the power connector) and it is now happily powering the rio. The audio quality didn't seem to have suffered while listening to it during testing.

Pitty I already have the Squeezebox replacement.