While I was in San Jose earlier this week, SWMBO emailed to let me know that the cs4231a chip from Stu had arrived. Such was the antici.....p.a.tion, I could hardly wait for the flight home!

Tonight I unpacked the chip, and prepared for surgery on beater, my empeg of many resurrections.

This is a unit I got in a 2-broken for 1-good swap eons ago, and it originally had a replacement cs4231a on it, but non-functioning -- a feature that extended to the rest of the player at the time. I had to remove this chip to salvage the rest, and found/fixed some I2C errors quite recently on it.

Now it was time to restore the missing chip. Before/after photos are below. Several pads were torn away (or cut) from the previous operations, four of which mattered -- so those got new jumper wires to restore the missing signals.

A fifth jumper (the bottom-most blue one in the photo below) adds the recently discovered reset-line fix for the chip.

The requisite hot-glue blobs were added after the second photo was taken, to hold things in place for the long term.

All is now well and working.. visuals for the tuner and all of that.

Cheers!