Saturday, September 19, 2015

P105 Yamaha Digital Piano No Sound From Speakers

Keyboard
It only took 2 weeks on the beach for me to realize this salt air is all wrong for my guitars and computer and digital piano. Then an earthquake in Chile sent a Tsunami this direction and I felt that was my second warning to get out of town. Then I dodged two evil looking Manta Rays in about 8 inches of water during my daily swim. I didn't heed any of these warnings, preferring to drink mojitos and go cliff diving and snorkeling for lost pirate gold (ironically losing my beaded necklace during one dive), and yesterday turned the piano on and there was no sound from the speakers. Then the sound returned, struggled, cut out, came back, staggered, and finally gave up for good. There was never any static, the sound simply cut out and came back, and then cut out. No sound from the 4 cheap internal speakers. The headphone jack works fine, as normal, the rear outputs work too, but with less volume and the L/R jack only puts out Left. The right puts out Right. I never tested these rear outputs before so I have no idea if this is normal. But I do know the headphone jacks are not stuck in closed position because I disconnected the headphone jack connector and there was still no sound from the speakers. The speaker wires both had continuity, the ribbon cables are secure, though the assembly techs at Yamaha could leave a little more slack so they aren't so tight. It all looks clean. The caps are not bulging. I put it all back together and there's no change.

I cursed my luck that this piano is a mere 20 months old, purchased at Guitar Center in Louisiana and trekked with me through some harrowing adventures but always protected in a padded case and treated gently when moving it to get into bed, in fact, I left the piano on the bed and slept in a hammock to avoid messing with it. All this was futile as the sea air possibly killed the speakers. So I took it apart since the closest warranty shop is in Texas I don't trust anyone to actually fix it here in Costa Rica. And I did spend a few years as an electronics tech and I have all the tools, but on closer inspection none of the wires were broken, there was no corrosion, the innards looked pristine, no debris. If you are curious, all of the 20+ screws on the bottom had to be removed to take the pieces apart. But they are all the same size screw so it's not too big a deal with a power driver.

Either a bad electrolytic capacitor or integrated circuit
All I could do is look for a bulging e-cap or corrosion or loose plastic connector. None of that was to be found so it could be an electrolytic capacitor going bad in either the power supply or the power amplifier section. Next would be an IC in the preamplifier stage followed by the power amp section..which is beyond the multimeter-on-a-tropical-beach testing stage. So the piano is retired from public performances. I am going deaf so the headphones are better. I do have an amplifier if an emergency comes up and I want to record something. Still, this is a bummer. If anyone out there in virtual world has fixed this problem then email me at oggybleacher@gmail.com
Lame. 20 months is a rotten life span for an electronic device. If it's one of these surface mount capacitors then it's not even my fault. It's simply crap components and bums me out because it's otherwise a good product. The P-105 has been discontinued too.

Update 9/16: The sound came back to the speakers, worked for a few months, then stopped again. Now when I turn it on I hear about two seconds of sounds from the speakers and then it cuts out. The headphone jack works fine and the tone is still clean but the speakers are not working. I think it's humidity and vibration or age and that circuit is intermittent. Probably can be fixed with $200 worth of troubleshooting but the piano is not hardly worth that investment. So I plan to give it away.
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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.