iHP120 Audio Dead, Fine Otherwise

[SlickMK]

Hi friends,

This is my first post here, but I have been a fan of iRiver players since I first bought one nearly five years ago (a 32MB flash model!). I currently have an iHP-120, and I need some help.

A few nights ago, my 120 was working when I went to bed, and it was not working when I got up in the morning. Nothing happened to it overnight. It’s never been wet, I can’t recall ever dropping it, and I baby it like the precious device it has become to me over the four years I’ve owned it. It was not plugged into a charger; it was simply sitting on my desk.

The problem is this: every part of the player works, except for what I can only guess is the amplifier. The player turns on, the hard drive is recognized, I can browse files, and the player will even load them. My computer recognizes it and I can transfer files to and from it. The only problem is that I can’t hear the music unless I turn it up to 40, at which point I can just make out the sounds playing. This happens for both the radio and the local files on the HDD. The line out doesn’t work well either, although the music is VERY slightly more hearable through it.

If it helps with your diagnosis, there is a popping sound in the right channel of my headphones when I turn it on. While listening to it, there is a lot of crackling, and I can hear through the headphones when the hard drive spins up, when the backlight activates, and when the screen images change (for instance, when going into the menus). Note that I said I hear this through the headphones, not physically from the player itself. I have not modified the player, nor have I installed RockBox or any other nonstandard software. It is loaded with the latest firmware from iRiver America.

I opened it up and looked around, but I saw nothing to indicate a damaged cap or chip. I read through parts of the “Repair of fried players” sticky in this forum, but I couldn’t find anything to help. Please note that this was not a problem with plugging in an incorrect charger. I’m home from school for the Christmas vacation, and the only charger I have here is my iRiver charger (aside from my laptop charger, the plug of which is much too large to fit in the iRiver).

Aside from detonating a nuclear bomb mere inches from the player last week, I can think of nothing that caused this problem. That was, of course, a joke.

While waiting on responses from you, the greatest online community ever, I will open the player again to check more extensively for blown/fried/sautéed components.

Please help! I love my iRiver! I have converted several friends away from the iPod to iRiver! And now I’m all alone, without a player in the world! Arg!

EDIT: I opened the iRiver again and I really cannot see anything that looks damaged. If someone can point me to a general area on the circuit board that controls amplification of the music signal, I will look there in more detail.

Sincerely,
-Matthew

[SlickMK]

Ahh! I promise I did not post this twice, but it is showing up twice in the forum page! If a mod sees this, could you please delete the first thread? (Is there a way I can do this myself?)

I surely seem to be a noob right now; my apologies...

[Dunno]

Chip failures without there being abuse is rare, yours is the first on this forum with this type of problem.

open the player, but lay it out in such a way that you can analyse the main board whilst it is playing back music, then apply pressure to various places on the board, if the playback "clears" whilst you're poking the board, then you'll know that its a "dry soldered" joint, which you can then carefully resolder. dont use a metal object to apply pressure with as this might short something whilst "poking", use a piece of hard plastic.

[SlickMK]

Thanks for the reply! I agree with you on the chip failure issue. I've been searching my memory to see if I can remember anything happening to it, but nothing comes to mind. The last thing I did was transfer a few new songs to it in preparation for a drive to town the next day.

This is a good first step, and I'll let you know what happens as soon as I try it. Do you think there is anything under the board to which the hard drive connects that may be the problem? That is the only area I haven't checked, since it the board appears to be soldered on.

(I don't know if that was clear enough. What I meant was that I definitely removed the hard drive, just not the board where it connects to the main circuit board, since it is soldered in place.)

[HorstIriver]

SlickMK, high scale integrated circuits sometimes fail because of electromigration or ionised contamination. The ions migrate when the chip is supplied with supply voltage, and after weeks/months/years the ions reach a spot on the chip where they cause a failure. In the past we had some rare cases, but we had chips that died a sudden death. The iriver does not have a separate amplifier chip. The headphone and the line out are fed directly by the main central chip that does the entire sound processing incl. D/A conversion. If it were a bad solder joint at the sound output pins, the headphone or the line out would fail, but not both because they are wired separately. And the fact that you hear music shows that the D/A conversion works and the digital part of this chip works as well. I guess that the output stage of this chip died. I develop electronics professionally, and I have a circuit diagram of the Iriver. Actually there is almost no chance to repair it yourself unless you have very good SMD soldering skills and equipment. But you can try to put pressure on some pins. Maybe the output stage of the chip has a separate ground pin that got disconnected.
Horst

[SlickMK]

Horst, thank you for your very informative reply. Where is this central chip that you decribed? For instance, is it on the hard drive side or the display side of the board? If you're talking about the Motorola chip, it's just below the display, right? Considering I've never soldered anything this small, I don't think there's much of a chance that I could repair it, but I will check for a ground pin as you suggested.

I would like to describe the method by which I followed Dunno's suggestion to poke around while the player was playing music. I took the player apart, turned it on (battery power, not mains), and loaded up a music file. I used the A-B repeat function to make the player repeat a certain portion of a song, and after the hard drive spun down, I disconnected it from the player (yes, while the player was on). This didn't seem to damage the player in any way, and it kept on playing from its onboard memory, giving me a chance to poke around at all the caps and chips. Unfortunately, I found nothing that seemed to fix the problem.

I will try Horst's suggestion and report back with a failure or success.

[HorstIriver]

Matthew, you are welcome. I called this chip 'central' because it is the centre of the sound processing, but it is not placed in the centre of the board. It is a Philips chip, it has about 40 pins, and it is the biggest chip close to the line out and headphone connectors. AFAIK it is not on the side of the display. Following the printed wires starting at the headphone/line connector should lead you directly to this chip, but you will find it easily anyway because it is the only chip of this size made by Philips. The Motorola chip is the main processor. If it fails, nothing, or almost nothing will work, so this chip definitely works on your Iriver. If you can play files, with or w/o sound, the processor will be OK. The processor handles the display contents, the file transfers from the hard drive to the Philips chip, it polls the buttons, etc. All those functions work perfectly on your player.
Good luck with your player! In case you don't have success: On ebay, there are people who sell their players because of dead hard drives, they don't know how to replace a hard drive, but reading the failure description states clearly that the hard drive only is defective. When I ran out of hard drive space on my 120, I bought a 140 with a defective hard drive, replaced the hard drive, and now I have a pretty cheap 140 (with a 60GB drive) that works perfectly. In case you don't have success, buying such a defective iriver and replacing the main board would be an option.
Ciao, Horst

[ringo00]

Sorry to bump an old thread, but my player is exhibiting the same symptoms as SlickMK's. It worked fine two days ago. Today when I turned it on and tried to listen to some tunes at work, no audio. The menus and buttons all work, the display and drive appear to be fine, but I can get no sound to come out of the device.

Other than replacing the battery a year ago, I have never had an incident with this player in the two years I have owned it. It has never been dropped or abused and it has always worked perfectly. I haven't had the chance to open it up yet as I am at work right now and I just discovered the problem.

The odd thing is that the headphone jack and the line out jack both seem to be in good working order as there is the normal static sounds when I plug in the headphones or turn it on. I use this device every day and I am sure the battery needs to be replaced again as it will only work for about 2 hours on a full charge, but I didn't think that would affect the audio output.

If anyone has any insight into this problem your input would be greatly appreciated.

[Dunno]

Originally Posted by ringo00

If anyone has any insight into this problem your input would be greatly appreciated.

haku succeeded in replacing the audio chip

Fried the audio chip on H140, swap one out from another board?

[ringo00]

Thanks for the input. I took apart the player and figured out what the problem is. It is definitely the audio chip. If anyone has a spare motherboard for an h1xx i would be willing to purchase it. otherwise my only option is to by one of the new ones on overstock and swap the drives. I think what happened is that the player was connected to my cigarette lighter style FM transmitter when I started my car and the cheap transmitter sent voltage down the headphone out into the chip. The transmitter is just a cheap Scosche (sp?) from Wal-mart that has a removable cable. The cable has a 3.5 mm plug on one end and a USB mini-B on the end that goes to the transmitter. I think somehow some voltage crossed to the player through a faulty connection on that cable.