I have a question for you guys.

I seem to have an abnormally high failure rate of head units in my IROC, especially lately.

A couple years back I put a barely used Kenwood Excelon head into the car and not long after it sh*t the bed and went off to repair with a cd still in it.

After that I bought my current JVC Sh-909 and JVC DV-7 cd and dvd players.

Not long after install, the cd player sh*t the bed, and off to repair it went with a cd in it.

Fast forward a year to last fall, and the dvd player will no longer eject my DVD. It tries to eject it, but gives up before it spits it out.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago. First trip out for the year with the IROC and the cd player sh*ts again. Pushing the eject button just produces some error code, but no eject.

So this week I yanked that out and put in a barely used Alpine that's always been 100% reliable until now. Yesterday I drove the car, and voila! It won't eject either.

I'm having WAY too many problems for this to be coincidence. There are only 2 things that I can think of that may be causing this: Power problems, or heat. My volt meter in the dash stays rock steady, but I'm wondering if I've got some kind of nasty AC ripple that the head units don't like. My head unit power wiring is 12AWG direct from the battery. My other guess is that maybe they're getting too much heat. The two heater ports that vent through the center console are just blowing into the console area, so it does get warm in there, but not hot.

Anybody have any experience with this sort of problem? I'm getting fed up with sending cd players out for repair every time I drive the car.

 

Ive never seen car problems cause cds to not eject. You mentioned you put in an alpine but how old is it? Ive never ever had problems with my alpine. No skips, No errors, nothing. Ive heard good things from eclipse too. I could be wrong but Im guessing your using old head units or poor working ones. JVC compared to alpine is like night and day. Also fixing broken head units over and over again doesnt seem like a good idea. If it breaks its probably gonna break again.

Again Jim Ive always respected your opinion but I would look into breaking down and getting something reliable as far as a head unit goes.

nate

 

When I used to sell the stuff, we had less JVC warranty claims than we did for Alpine. The JVC Digifine stuff is a major step above the typical JVC garbage. Burr Brown 24 bit DA converters, blah blah blah. It's a clean head unit, and I never had a single one come in for warranty work while I was selling the hell out of them.

The Kenwood is a $750 Excelon head unit that worked flawlessly in my previous car, and since being repaired, has worked flawlessly in my girlfriend's car.

The JVC products had well under 100 hours of total use (probably under half of that). I only put about 1k miles on the car since I installed them. The Alpine was in my other camaro for a year, then sat unused until now.

We're not talking about flea market junk with a questionable history here. Everything that's been in my car is something that I bought brand new, took great care of, and hadn't been used much.

I've had 5 head unit failures in this car within the course of less than 10k miles. I've never had a failure in any of my other cars in well over 100k combined miles. You do the math. Something's causing failures in this car.

The best I can figure is that my alternator isn't properly filtering out the AC ripple. DC motors don't like AC ripple.

 

That is a vary unusual situation you have there.
First:
1. Are you using a lot a CD-Rs/DVD-Rs?
2. Are you using those stick-on labels?

The most common cause of eject problems is dirt and dust. It’s a common thing with the JVCs to need the loading rollers cleaned. I think that the SH-909 (Good SQ HU) still used the old mechanism. It usually just needed a cleaning for eject problems. The newer mechanisms have a little flip-flop on the side of the mech, with an arm that likes to brake if you hit a bump at just the right point in the load/un-load cycle. (all part of the move to make the mechs run with two motors instead of three, now the one motor handles the loading and the sled with a more complicated ‘transmission’ system) But that’s still not nearly as common as just dirty loading rollers. I’ll have to look in to wich mech. it uses. Another dirt/dust related possibility with the SH-909 could be the faceplate position switches. A lot of the JVC with the motorized faceplate will throw a code if it see a problem with dirty/glitchy/bouncy position switches. If that happens it will stop the un-load cycle because it doesn’t know where the faceplate really is.
With the Alpine try this, hold down the eject button for 5 seconds. If it is a motorized flip face unit you need to have the face in the open position fist. This will force an unload cycle. The Alpine’s are vary sensitive to switch bounce problems (dirty switches). This will, for lack of a better word, confuse the mechanism processor to think there is no CD there or just lock-up the processor. This could be just a glitch. Sometimes if you force the un-load cycle you can get the CD out, the mech. will re-set it self and not have any more problems. Not often though.
Heat isn’t the best thing for any HU. The loading rollers and optical pickup just don’t like it. But I don’t think the heat is causing your problem, but maybe the heat vent.
Here’s my thought. It’s not the heat from the vent under the console, but maybe dust getting kicked up by the moving air. I’m reminded for a problem Alpine had with their first in dash DVD HU. They couldn’t keep the optical pickups clean. They just kept coming in needing to be cleaned. Their fix for this (and it worked great) was to unplug the rear cooling fan and cut the wires off, then re-assemble the unit in a new chassis with less cooling holes in the side. No more needing to be cleaned every other month.
Try fixing any air leaks and get the vents to vent outside of the console.
This doesn’t explain the DVD player, but maybe that one was a coincidence. And the Kenwood’s have there own problems depending on the model/mechanism.

 

sounds like a good explanation. Maybe theres just some dust getting stirred up in the dash or something and its getting into the head unit. Who knows.

 

Thanks for the explanation. I was hoping you'd see my post.

Just to answer:

Every cd that's currently stuck is a purchased cd, not a CDR. If I've had any CDRs in these units, it's not many. None of my CDRs have labels.

Along with the no eject situation with the Alpine, the tuner reception was severely comprimised. While I had the car running yesterday, all of a sudden the reception came back to normal, so I quickly hit "eject" and got my cd out. A minute or 2 later, the tuner went AWOL again. On my ride home, it was in and out. There's some kind of short in the alpine, probably a ground issue.

Your explanation for the faceplate position switches on the 909 sound a lot like what's happening, because in addition to not ejecting, I also can't tilt the faceplate. I get an error code instead. I don't suppose this is something that I can service myself is it?

Having too much dust in the head units, though not impossible, would surprise me. The car sits in a garage with the windows up year round. It gets very little usage.

Thanks for the info.

 

Is there something missing from the model number (SH-909)? I can’t seen to pull up any service info. Isn’t there a letter in front?

It's a KD-SH909 right?

 

Perhaps the deck slightly angled up in 3rdgens cause more dust to get it?

My Soney ES POS lasted quite awhile before it had a hard time pushing discs out. If it was perfectly horizontal, it'd work, but not at the tilted angle the deck sits at installed.

 

Yup. Thanks.

 

some of it might from how angled the deck is in our consoles... if you look in the manual, the stock position of our stereo locations is near the tilt limit for most decks

 

I remember you saying you had some of the service info your self. Some helpful hints.
1. Don’t F’up the flimsy arms for the faceplate. Those cost over $40.00 a pop.
2. Going by memory here. The are two screws on the bottom, 2 on the top, the right side should have one (maybe two), and for left side with the heat sink, putting the heat sink back on (or not taking it all the way off) will save you some grief, JVC amp ICs get hot fast, and it will keep some of the heat sink compound off of you.
3. It may take some force to get the top and bottom separated. This is because the CD mech will come out attached to the top. So it takes some force to get it unplugged.
4. I don’t think that this one will work right with out the CD mechanism unplugged. It looks to confirm there isn’t a CD half loaded before it will close the faceplate. There is a correction out about a new part number for the extension cable. I don’t use the extension that often. You can take the mech off of the top of the unit by removing three screws. Then use a thick rag between the mech and the main PCB. The mech will not be stable just plugged in, this step will keep things from shorting to the bottom of the mech.
5. The first thing you should do is to vary gently by hand try and give the faceplate drive motor a turn by hand (it will be greasy so this may be easier with a little Exact-O knife to dig in a little). This will tell you if the drive ***’y is locked-up. If it is it will need to be cleaned and re-lubricated. It may also be helpful to put it back together (just the main PCB, faceplate, and CD mech, not all the way back together) at this point and see if it works, another indication the drive ***’y was locked-up.
6. Cleaned the faceplate position switches with a GOOD cleaner. Something like De-OxiT D5 (SP?). This is the BEST contact cleaner I’ve ever used. It's will worth its weigh in gold.
7. Also, see if the driver IC for the faceplpate gets hot. I have had to replace one or two of them. But that’s not vary common at all. I want to say it’s IC681 (LA6579).

This is all of course it the faceplate is stuck in the ‘UP’ position. That’s where it’s stuck, right?

 

Yeah, it's stuck "up" in the standard position. The first time it wouldn't eject my cd, I pressed the button to tilt the faceplate and it worked that one time. The 2nd time, that just spit out a different error code instead of functioning.

 

Just happened to my DVD player too. I'm NOT happy. I'll take it apart and report back when I fix it. Luckily an indash mp3 player is on the way.

 

It may also be helpful to run the loading mechanism with the unit apart to, just to confirm proper operation. Once the CD mechanism is unplugged the loading motor in that unit is unplugged from the driver. You should be able to give the loading motor 3-4Vdc and run the disk in and out a couple of times. With the CD stuck in the mech give the loading motor some juice, black to red and red to black at the motor. You should see the optical pickup move to home (in side of the disk) then the disk should un-chuck (just means un-clamp) and move out of the mech. This should tell you the mechanism is OK. It's hard to tell with out seeing the unit. But sometime loading problems can trip-up those unit's. Don't think this is your problem though.