Today strange things happened with my Yamaha RX601 AV-receiver. A sudden problem that was solved in an unexpected way. After which I thought it might be a good idea to tell others about it. Maybe someone can someday benefit from this story. It all started with ‘no sound from speakers’. If you don’t care for a tl;dr just jump to the penultimate paragraph.
The AV-receiver is hooked up to three HDMI inputs: an Apple TV, an ip radio and television box, and a DVD-player. HDMI out goes to an LG tv set that’s only used as a monitor, its sound permanently muted. Yamaha’s speaker outputs go to a pair of huge, experienced and absolutely beautifully sounding TDL transmission line speakers. Very much out of fashion, but I enjoy them daily and want nothing else.
After having had no problems whatsoever with this setup since buying the Yamaha about four years ago, today I wanted to listen to the radio and heard nothing. Everything on the Yamaha’s display looked normal, the tv showed the usual screen from the ip box telling me the radio program was playing. To rule out any other problems with the radio/tv circuit, I tried the Apple TV and the DVD/CD-input: both showing everything as normal, but no sound. Same with the Yamaha’s built-in radio receiver.
So I pressed the menu button on the remote and looked at the tv screen to see if it had something to say. And yes: the RX601 had found a software update and wanted it installed. As it has an ethernet connection to my home network just for this reason, I let it do the update online. After about five minutes the front panel display told me it had succeeded and wanted me to power down the receiver.
So I did. After waiting for a few seconds and switching it back on I saw it lighting up as usual, as always accompanied by the clicking sound from the speaker relay. Again, everything seemed to function well – apart from there still being absolute silence. Again I powered the Yamaha down, this time also pulling the power chord from the socket, putting it back after a few minutes and then powering up. To no avail.
I selected my ip-box again, chose a tv program, saw a perfectly normal moving image on the tv screen. Still not hearing anything, I turned up Yamaha’s volume knob all the way to 0 dB and held my ear close to both speakers (trusting the problem wouldn’t choose exactly this moment to suddenly solve itself…). Not a trace of hiss to be heard.
Anger and frustration left room for one last moment idea. So I went upstairs and got my headphones. That I had never used with the Yamaha before, nor had anything else ever been plugged into the front panel headphones connector. A second earlier I had thought of turning the volume knob turned down to a normal setting – and that turned out to be a great idea: there was sound from the headphone! Sound from every input I tried. And what’s more: on pulling the headphone plug, my trusty old TDL speakers came to life!
Problem solved. Leaving me happy but wondering what had actually happened. Apparently the switch that mutes the speaker outputs when plugging in the headphone had been stuck somehow. But how can that happen with a switch inside a technically virgin connector? Had that software update had anything to do with it? But the problem already appeared right before that update. Makes me think: is this a mechanical switch, or is there some digital circuitry involved? If anyone has any thought on this, I’d be happy to know. If not, keep this story in mind!
