Update time again . Got two emails from Empeg yesterday. First was from David in Sales to say my display would be sent out in the afternoon, second email from Peter in Dispatch to say that my display had been collected by TNT, also gave me the tracking number. Got home from work today to find a parcel from Empeg containing my nice new display. Looked at the invoice and had a bit of a shock to find that the price quoted to me was not including VAT on either the display itself or the carriage. Quoting part of the email:

"Total cost is £78. We can ship the replacement display on Monday (overnight before 12 delivery) or you can pick it up during office hours (cost would then be £70)."

Anyway, it was good of them to send me out a display and not insist that I send the whole player back to them so I'm not going to make a big thing out of it so I'll leave it there.
I did as I said in my previous post and cut the leads on the old display, desoldered the Blue wire from one of the leads and cut through the foam backing pads with a scalpel. The display then just lifted off. I desoldered & removed what remained of the leads from the PCB and made sure that all of the holes were clear of solder. I also cut off any remaining foam left on the board. I then found some more double sided sticky foam pads which were a bit thicker than the originals but seemed to be OK and stuck them on the PCB. After slightly bending up the lead which had to have the Blue wire soldered to it (it doesn't go through the board) I soldered the new display in place making sure there was a reasonable amount of clearance between the nipple and the volume control body. Then I reassembled the player in the normal way, plugged it into the player and "Hey Presto!!!" I'd got my display back just as it was before I stupidly dropped it. Actually it's better than before because the old one was starting to show signs of 'burn-in'.

Anyway, if anyone else has the need to replace their display then take heart, if you're reasonably competent at using a soldering iron you should have no problem doing it yourself - it's not rocket science as they say .

Good luck if you ever need to do it yourself.

Marcus (beaker)
32 gig (various colours)