Player going to standby when turning on high beam

Every third or fourth time I turn on my highbeams, the player goes into standby, then start up with the low-voltage (battery) icon in the upper lefthand corner. It also happens when doing some wide turns or using on the indicators. Note that I have two MK2s and on the other one, nothing like that happens. It also doesn't happen when plugged in AC. Does anyone have an idea of what is wrong with it? Maybe some soldering is bad inside? Or the connector is loose?

I'm assuming that when you say "I have two MK2's", you mean, you have two players, and when you slide the second one into the same dock in your car, then the second player doesn't exhibit the bad behavior. (As opposed to, say, two MK2's installed in the car simultaneously).

When you say that it happens sometimes when the car turns a corner, that sounds like a loose wiring problem or a wire chafing problem. It's hard to tell from that if the problem is inside the player or if the problem is in the car wiring, because wire harnesses and connectors are involved in both places. If the problem is inside the player, it might even be as serious as a loose screw rattling around inside, or a frayed HDD cable or display cable. Or maybe a loose disk drive tray which is grounding out something inside the car when you go round a corner. Check for those things.

The fact that it happens to one player and not the other would indeed make it seem like the problem is confined to inside that particular player. But, not necessarily. It could still be an issue with the car or the wiring, and one of the two players is simply more sensitive to it than the other one. By any chance, is one of the players a MK2 and the other a MK2A? There are slight differences between the two with regard to how well they tolerate bad wiring, it's described here. If the MK2 is the bad one and the MK2A is the good one, then I'd still suspect a problem outside the player, such as loose wiring in the installation, or loose wires in the docking connector.

Hello and thanks for a quick reply. The MK2 is the good one and the MK2a is the "bad" one. I've only seen it happens once or twice around a big corner. There is not a problem in the connector on the sled, because it has been fixed with solder on the wires to ensure good contact and no loose wires.

To add to Tony's points:

1. Is this a new problem? When did it start happening?
2. I'm confused about the "wide corners" thing. Until you mentioned that, it sounded exactly like a low-voltage brown-out, which can be caused by an aging battery, or a dodgy alternator, which might affect one player more than the other. I had a problem where if I had the A/C, the heated windows and the lights on, when I hit the brake pedal (more lights), the player would brown out.
3. On the "wide corners" thing, are we talking about slow wide corners or fast wide corners? Are you pulling G's here? Do you have traction control (more electrical load)?

It started when I started to use the MK2a. Wide corners mostly in relativly slow speed. The player is installed in an E30.

Try turning on the headlights, the air conditioning, the heated rear window, the heated seats, everything that eats electricity in your car. If that doesn't cause the Mark2a to "brown out", then it is likely that your alternator/battery/regulator are OK. If under those circumstances the player will works properly with low beams on, and the high beams make it brown out, then I'd start looking for a problem with the high beams, some sort of unusual current draw.

tanstaafl.