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.