INFO PAGE...
The following information is intended for UK readers. It may not be relevant in other countries.
It is written with almost 30 years experience in the Hi-Fi and In-Car Audio repair industry.
THE LATEST...
Car entertainment has changed drastically over
the past 10 years. Ten years ago everyone was using Car Radio Cassettes and had
a vast library of cassettes. Then came Minidisk, which was only produced by a
couple of manufacturers and never really caught on due to the high price of the
units. Next came CD players, and the later ones of these would also play CDRs
that you compiled on your computer. There were a few around that would also
connect to your MP3 player. The latest idea is to use your existing Car Radio
CD or Car Radio Cassette, and use your MP3 player in conjunction with a small
tramsmitter unit which transmits the signal to a spare FM radio channel on your
radio. This is the cheapest way of playing MP3 music though your car HI-FI.
DO NOT use those horrid plug-in cassette adapters that go into the
cassette slot of your car HI-Fi and plug into the headphone socket of your MP3
or portable CD player. They have been known to ruin cassette decks and the
overall quality is poor; sometimes little better than MW reception.
MP3
players and transmitters seem to be the future, until something else comes
along.
SERVICING...
We often receive Car Radio Cassettes for
repair that have been giving good service in cars for up to 10 years, and have
never been serviced in all that time! Needless to say they require a lot of
work and spares to restore them to a workable state. Some, because of the lack
of servicing, are written off as ‘Beyond Economical Repair’. We
can’t imagine anyone buying a new car and not having that serviced for ten
years! So why leave the Radio Cassette until it finally gives up the ghost! If
you are using the unit regularly on a daily basis, it should really be serviced
at least once a year. If you live local to us why not drop it in when your car
goes in for a service at your local garage; most can be done the same day.
Radios fitted to modern cars by the manufacturers usually cost over £300,
many much more, so it makes sense to look after them. Many cassette players,
when suffering from a lack of servicing, will start to tangle your tapes. If
you buy pre-recorded ones, you will not have to tangle many of these to cover
the equivalent cost of a service to the unit.
If you should get a tape
jammed in the machine and it won’t eject switch off the set immediately!
This may save the cassette motor from burning out. Never try to force it out as
damage to the mechanism will certainly occur; and never try to extract a
cassette with tweezers or pliers or you will probably make the deck
unrepairable! Most radios are easily removed from the vehicle with a couple of
clips inserted into the front panel, which usually takes only a minute or two;
so there is no need to leave your car at our premises. If your unit is coded
always bring the code information with you when requiring a service, as this
will save time and money. If you don’t know the code, don’t despair,
as we can decode around 95% of radios in our workshop whilst servicing
them.
PURCHASING CAR RADIO CASSETTES...
Unfortunately there are a lot of very cheap car radio cassettes
on the market these days. Digitals from as little as £45. Manual models
even cheaper. Some of these units fail after only a few weeks, and of course
are returned under warranty. Many others fail before their 12 month warranty
expires, and seldom do they last more than a couple of years.
Always buy a
recognized make; Pioneer, Philips, JVC, Blaupunkt, etc. as these reputable
companies keep spares for their models for many years into the future,
sometimes up to 10 years or more. The cheap, or unknown makes are often
imported from the far east and some have no spares available, even when new!
Expect to pay in excess of £100 for a reasonable Digital Car Radio
Cassette. If you cannot afford this amount, consider a reconditioned unit.
We normally have these available at a fraction of their original price, and
occasionally have well-known digital units available from as low as £35.
Don’t be duped into buying one of the cheap new ones, as you will be
disappointed. We heard that one poor soul who purchased a cheap car radio
cassette who actually had to take back four units to the shop in one day,
before he found one that would work. You have been warned! Please note that we
never recondition and sell these cheap makes second-hand, as we can never
guarantee them to last. We only sell units that we would be happy to install in
our own vehicles. If you can’t afford one of our reconditioned units it is
best to save up and wait until you can.
Also, beware of second hand shops
or friends who sell units with a few days warranty, or occasionally with no
warranty at all; telling you they work fine; they rarely
do!
SECURITY
SYSTEMS...
Thousands of car
radios are stolen from vehicles every year, and there is no easy answer to the
problem. Over the past decade several systems have been introduced by
manufacturers. The first, was to supply a ‘code number’ for each
individual radio, so that if it was stolen, the final purchaser would not be
able to use it without the code. Due to the number of garages and private
individuals selling cars and forgetting the codes that related to the radios,
several computer-orientated companies began selling equipment that could decode
these sets. There are so many companies decoding radios these days that the
security function of coded radios has become worthless. We normally leave coded
radios "switched off" (code function disabled) where possible, as this allows
the customer to disconnect the car battery as many times as they like without
having to worry about entering the code number. Incidentally, if you should
loose your code number, never try to put in random numbers as you will
eventually ‘lock out’ the set and cause more work to be required when
decoding it. The earliest sets had 250 combinations; most of the modern ones
have up to 99,999!
The next range of security sets to emerge where the
removable types. These could be removed with a handle on the front panel from
the cradle box assembly which remained in the car, and connections were
automatically made on the back of the set when it was replaced. There are two
disadvantages to this system. Firstly you have to remember to remove it every
time you leave the car, and lock it in the boot, or
carry it around with you. (Most owners give up on this practice after a week or
two and leave it permanently in the car). The second problem is that when you
need the unit to be serviced you have to remove the cradle assembly and all the
wiring as well, as most models have different wiring to the multiplugs on the
back and we have no way of connecting them up on the bench in order to work on
them.
A more recent innovation has been to produce sets with a removable
front panel (known as face-off sets). These suffer from two problems. The tiny
connections on the panel which mate with the set wear out or bend, and also
there is the risk of dropping the front panel when putting it in or out of your
pocket. Front panels can be very expensive to replace (£85 or more) and
can normally only be obtained direct from the manufacturers or main dealers.
Some manufacturers are making sets with very small removable sections; these
are very easy to loose!
One of the latest innovations from the car
manufacturers is to fit a car radio which has no digital display and few
controls on it. The display fits into the dashboard and the controls fit into
the steering wheel. The problem with these is that
some of them are not serviceable by normal repair shops such as our own, as we
may not have external displays or external controls available for us to work on
them. These are normally returned via the main dealer and a reconditioned set
supplied as a replacement. A very expensive option.
Some of the very latest
sets have an extremely large front panel, or a peculiarly-shaped front panel,
which forms part of the dashboard; making it almost impossible to fit anything
but exactly the same model. There are even a few that are built into the
dashboard with just a few controls poking through. The whole dashboard has to
be removed to even get to them. Needless to say they have to be repaired though
a main dealer. If you should ever require a replacement; you will be very
surprised at the cost - several hundred pounds!
HI-FI EQUIPMENT...
Many years ago hi-fi equipment accounted for quite a large
proportion of our repair work. These days we get very little to repair. This is
not to say that it never goes wrong or is more reliable; unfortunately the
reverse is true. Around 20 years ago companies started producing cheap hi-fi
units (around £100-£200). Previous to this you would have been
expected to pay around £300 or more for a well-known brand-name, and this
would have lasted up to 20 years, or more. Unfortunately, so many manufacturers
have jumped on the bandwagon and produced cheap unreliable hi-fi units, that
the market has been flooded with them, and the average consumer thinks that
they are getting a bargain. The old adage “you get what you pay for”
applies equally to hi-fi equipment as it does to most other things we buy these
days. There are no budget hi-fi systems worth considering these days. If you
buy a cheap unit don’t expect it to last more than a year or two. And
remember that these cheap units are nearly always uneconomic to repair. We have
seen mini Hi-Fi- units with CD players included for as little as £30; it
would cost more than it was worth to strip down one of these for inspection,
let alone repair it!
Over the past few years people have been throwing away
their old full size stack systems (sometimes costing over £500) and
buying the small modern cheap units. If you have the room to spare, hang on to
your old system and have it serviced or repaired when necessary. There are good
hi-fi systems available these days from specialist dealers, but be prepared to
pay in excess of £350 if you want one that is going to last a reasonable
number of years. If your old unit doesn’t have a compact disc player
incorporated, there is no need to buy a new system. There are some excellent
quality CD players available now as separate units, which can be connected to
the Aux or Tape2 inputs of your existing hi-fi system. But beware; there are
some cheap ones, from £50 to £80, which can be rather unreliable.
Stick to a recognized well-known brand name and expect to pay £100+ for a
good unit. Unless you really need one, avoid multiplay systems (which hold 3 or
more disks) and go for a single player. There is far less to go wrong in this
type of CD.
Remember, also, that CD players don’t last forever. If
used regularly a good quality one should last for up to 5 years, occasionally
longer. A cheap one may not last out it’s 12 month warranty! CD players
are expensive to repair, often costing up to £100 or more, as the spares
that are needed are quite expensive. If the unit is over two years old it is
probably best to replace it with a new one, as you could easily pay out
£80 or more to have it repaired, only to have another fault appear a few
months later.
Please note: we have no equipment to do CD repairs
ourselves, so you are at the mercy of the large main
dealers.
CD PLAYERS FOR CARS...
The market has been flooded recently with cheap car CD players. These
last at best a couple of years; sometimes a lot less. The front mounting single
disk players take a pounding on our poor roads as well as getting contaminated
with fine dust; so the best systems are those fitted in the boot of the car,
with the control panel in the main radio-cassette unit which fits in the front
of the car. These have better vibration suppression systems fitted, and the
music is less likely to skip tracks when driving over bumpy roads. Expect to
pay around £200+ for a reliable remote system.
Think carefully before
buying a CD Player for your car. They are expensive and do not last anywhere
near as long as a good radio cassette; the best seldom last more than a few
years before having problems; the cheap ones far less. A CD player in the car
can, in real terms, can be a lot more costly than a car radio cassette! Another
problem is contamination; they don't appreciate having dust, sand or fine earth
particles in their mechanism. If you live in an area where these problems are
common, think twice about investing in one of these units. We actually met a
farmer who used a CD player in his tractor; guess how long it lasted after it
got contaminated by fine earth particles?
If you use CD’s at home on
your Hi-Fi, you could always record them on a tape (check copyright laws
first!) and use these in your car radio cassette.
There have recently been
sold on the high street some extremely cheap front loading car CD's costing as
little as £30. Needless to say, these are extremely unreliable, and we
have heard of some of these only lasting a week or so before failing; we heard
of one that only lasted 24 hours! Although these are theoretically guaranteed
for 12 months, how many times will you have the patience to return it to the
shop during this period. Most purchasers give up after two or three times and
throw it in the bin; a total waste of money.
MINIDISKS AND MP3
PLAYERS FOR CARS...
There have
appeared in the last couple of years, firstly Minidisk players (only produced
by a few major companies) and recently MP3 Players for cars. While these are
generally good quality and made by major manufacturers, sooner or later the
'Cheapo's' will appear on the market. Once again, you get what you pay for.
Expect to pay around £200+ for a Minidisk and a little more for a car MP3
player. Stick to a well known reliable make.
However, there are a few
problems with both these systems. Firstly, like CD players, they don't
appreciate having dust, sand or fine earth particles in their mechanism. If you
live in an area where these problems are common, think twice about investing in
one of these units. Secondly, when they go wrong, don't expect to easily find
someone that can fix them. Ordinary workshops will not have the specialized
equipment needed, and the chances are that you will have to return it to the
manufacturers, either direct or via their main dealer. Be warned,
manufacturers' repair charges are almost always very high, sometimes the cost
can approach that of a comparable new unit!
CAR INSTALLATIONS...
Remember that installing a car hi-fi system is a professional job. If
you are not exactly sure what you are doing, leave well alone. We have seen
many customers that have just purchased an expensive set-up; tried to install
it themselves, and burnt-out the whole system; an expensive mistake. We have in
the past repaired customers’ units only to see them returned the next day
burnt-out, where the customer has made the same mistake again! Remember that if
you do wrongly wire up a unit that we have repaired, and do damage to it, it
will not be covered under our warranty, and we can always tell!
PROBLEMS WITH CASSETTE
PLAYERS...
We
occasionally have customers return with units that have just been repaired or
serviced who think that they still have a fault. Almost all these problems are
due to faulty or the wrong type of cassettes. It is not widely known that most
standard units are not designed to play ‘Chrome’ cassette tapes. If
your unit hasn’t a ‘Chrome’ button on the controls, the chances
are that it has not been designed to play them. As well as sounding very
"tinny", they may well slip and slide in the mechanism due to the tape's much
shinier surface than standard ‘ferric’ cassettes. None but the top
range machines, with ‘chrome’ buttons will play them reliably. Many
pre-recorded cassettes you purchase these days are produced on chrome tape
(recognized by the very dark surface of the tape; nearly black).
If you
have some of these tapes don’t despair, as the easiest way is to dub them
on to a standard ferric tape for use in your car; assuming you have access to a
twin-tape hi-fi system (remember to check copyright regulations first!).
Remember: a tape that plays in your hi-fi system at home may not necessarily
play in your car unit, as the decks in hi-fi units are of a different design
and a stronger construction.
Another problem that some of our customers
have, is with old cassettes that have been used for several years and are
simply worn out. They are very likely to tangle even in a good machine that has
just been serviced, as well as sounding very 'bassy' and blurred. If one of
your tapes sounds like this then it is a sure sign that it is coming to the end
of it’s useful life. These old tapes can also clog up cassette
heads and pinchwheels in a few minutes by depositing oxide into the machine.
If you have had your unit serviced or repaired and it is still having
problems, try it with a new good quality tape. If this works fine then your
unit is probably OK.