in 2003 i bought a decent home theater system for the living room. it was a philips mx3900d with a 5-dvd/cd changer, dolby dogital and dts 5.1-chanel surround sound, 5 satellite speakers, a subwoofer, and 500 watts of total system power. not a top of the line unit by any means, but a nice fit for our budget and living room. i used it on wednesday night for my annual pre-thanksgiving viewing of the john hugh's classic, "planes, trains, and automobiles", and yesterday to dish out about 8 hours worth of jazz mp3's throughout the day. at some point last night, one of my children, (although they are all employing the "it wasn't me" defense strategy) put 2discs in one of the trays, hopefully by mistake. needless to say, the discs became jammed inside the unit and wouldn't play, nor would any of the disc trays open to eject said discs. not wanting to force the trays open for fear of breaking them, i scoured the web for any means of support i could find. miraculously i came across the "philips mx3900d service manual", not to be confused with the "philips mx3900d user's manual", which explains the following in no uncertain terms: "do not attempt to repair this unit yourself, you must take it to a philips authorized repair center". yeah - right, thats' gonna happen. i sorted through the service manual and came across the process for starting the system in diagnostic mode (a combination of depressed buttons while plugging the power in) and ran through several tests, including resetting the system nvram. none of these diagnostic tests seemed to work, (at the time i didn't know about the jammed discs, all i knew was that the disc's could not be read and that the trays would not open). i then saw the section that explained the somewhat intimidating dis assembly process and decided at that point that i was "going in". now i am quite comfortable when it comes to cracking open a computer to replace a hard drive, or install memory, but seeing seeing the dismantling instructions in the manual the thought of performing surgeory on my home theater system proved a little daunting. i figured that even if the unit was broken, at minimum i would get my discs back as there were 4 inside. i knew that today, being the day after thanksgiving, a traditionally light work day and where recent surveys show that 78% of employers give today as a holiday (sorry - off topic), would be an ideal time for this project. alex, a work buddy of mine, and a guy particularly skilled with all things mechanical, assisted with the dis assembly of the unit, unjamming the jam, and putting it back together. now it's up and happily reading and ejecting disc's once again! it feels good to fix something yourself (even with substantial help from a friend) rather than taking it someplace to get soaked from a repair shop.
1 comment:
I wish you had posted the diagnostic & reset codes. Although i might have come across them a year ago after finding your blog.
Mine died last year after running nearly 24/7 for almost 10 years as my PC/PS3 sound system. After my last move 2 years ago odd things started to happen like random shut offs(once every 3 months or so.) Took it apart and it was still clean but sprayed some air just in case.
A few months later my dad stayed over for a week so i shut it off for some reason since i work nights and used headphones on my days off instead, and after he left it just wouldn't come back on.
Took it apart replaced some bulging Caps, but it would still just click on for a couple seconds and then shut off. So I Thought I'd sell it for parts/repair but no bites. Today I finally figured I'd salvage it for parts; speakers, resistors, caps... And while doing that i figured I'd try one more time to bring it back to life.
Well, whatever i did, it worked. Might of been pressing buttons while powering up, maybe it was reconnecting random ribbons, or most likely, it might of been from running my fingers over the pins on the large chips on the boards behind the front panel(invisible dust bridging.)
At least i can now sell it as a working system (after some testing) since I purchased a 7.2 Receiver. That if it still has any value.
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