I helped my Dad buy a used Central awhile back, and he has been enjoying it for the last year or so...

Unfortunately, it has developed an intermittent problem, and I was hoping to get some ideas from the "Brain Trust" here...He feeds the RCA audio outputs to a stereo receiver to listen to the music. Most of the time (about 95%) there is no audio now coming out of the Central, either when playing music from the hard drive or when playing a CD directly.

Every once in awhile it will play audio if you power it down for some time and then power it back up and try it, but even that is no guarantee that it will come back to life on the audio outputs.

I was over there today and brought it back with me, and it has no audio output no matter what I do. The LCD display shows playing songs ticking off the seconds, and the little bar graph at the bottom of the display is moving in time with the song being played, so it appears that the player thinks its playing the music. But just no audio output.

I've tried opening up the unit and checking some basic things like cable connections, etc. But nothing pops up as looking suspicious. One thing I haven't tried yet is the digital audio output, so maybe that will shed some light.

Does anyone have any suggestions of things to look at or anything to try? Other than the missing audio output, everything else looks normal...

Thanks, Randy

Does the Central have a headphone socket ? If it does then check that for a short, it could be shorting and disabling the RCA outputs.

Thanks, good suggestion Andy. But there is no headphone socket that I'm aware of...The RCA output jacks are soldered onto the main board, so no wires to look at there.

Interesting that no audio is present from either channel, so the problem must be further upstream than the hardware/connections associated with one of the channels...

I'm still thinking about it and will probably crack it open it again soon....

Thanks, Randy

Get a shell up on console (plug in a USB keyboard and hit Ctrl-Alt-Del), and see whether you get audio output if you cat a WAV file to /dev/dsp. That should neatly divide it into a player configuration problem (if that works) or a kernel or hardware problem (if it doesn't).

Peter