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Strange car radio symptoms
JoeSpareBedroom wrote:
"HL0105" wrote in message ... I've got a 2003 Camry SE, with the stock Radio/CD player, 6 speakers. A couple weeks ago we had some unusually warm weather for January (I'm in the chicago area.) For a couple days it got up as high as 50 degrees, and very humid. At that time, my radio appeared to go south. The sound was full of static and distortion. Adjusting the balance setting, I discovered that the left channel was the problem. While the right channel was perfectly fine, the left channel would either cut out completely, or be so full of static and distortion that it was unusable. This was when the radio was playing; AM or FM. When I switched to the CD player, BOTH left and right channels worked fine. This tells me that it wasn't the speakers, or the wiring, but that it was the Radio/CD player unit that was defective. Somehow the left channel - of the radio portion of the unit only - was defective. When the weather returned to the typical cold, dry January weather, the problem disappeared. BOTH left and right channels worked fine, for both the radio and the CD player. It was too much of a coincidence that the problem corresponded exactly with the weather. So I'm left with no other conclusion that the root cause of this problem was the unusually warm, humid weather in January. Has anyone ever known of this happening? Any insight you can provide would be appreciated. Thanks. Circuit boards can flex with temperature changes, and if there's a tiny crack, the flexing will cause part of a circuit to open and close. This is why technicians will sometimes use a heat gun to force this to happen during the diagnostic process. This is the only intelligent answer to this whole thing. There could also be a dozen other reasons for the problem. Don't take it to the dealer, though. They'll just send the unit to an independent repair place and probably charge you double what the shop charges them, plus labor to take out and reinstall the unit. Check your yellow pages for places that fix these things, and remove the unit yourself if you can. Better yet, just replace it with an aftermarket deck... or if you really need a stock deck, pick one up from a wrecker. |
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