ARCHIVED FORUM -- March 2012 to February 2022READ ONLY FORUM
This is the second Archived Forum which was active between 1st March 2012 and 23rd February 2022
I recently acquired a very nice condition 9000, but immediately noticed that settings weren't being saved. Now that these are three decades old, I guessed the lithium battery might be well past its sell-by date, and a thread on this forum reinforced my suspicions. I set about changing it, and thought I'd share my experience in case other people attempt it.
The first thing to note is that I struggled to locate the battery after opening up the Beocenter. The fact it was covered in something like masking tape didn't help, but I finally found it to one end of the silver box (presumably the brains of the BC). The giveaway is the large yellow label warning of lithium battery explosion! I found it essential to partly remove the box to get access to the solder points, which meant I had to uncouple most of the cable connectors and the IR remote receiver.
Anyway, having located a replacement battery (thanks to a thread on this forum) on a well know auction site, I soldered in the replacement battery, reconnected all the cables, and refitted the box.
This is where things got interesting, and where I'm hoping I can help others avoid the time it took me to figure things out.
The BC started up fine, and everything looked good until I tried to adjust the sound settings. As I cycled through the Treble/Balance/Bass, each time I got to Balance the top and bottom displays of the BC went crazy, with all the lights flashing on and off rapidly. As soon as I pressed 'Sound' to move onto Treble, everything went back to normal. I don't know how many times I checked all the connections inside, polarity of the battery etc. Then, when on the Balance setting, I decided to try actually changing the Balance (even though all the button lights were going crazy) and the second I did all the flashing stopped. Once I stored the new settings, the behaviour stopped completely.
My guess is that the sound settings were somehow reset when i changed the battery, but the balance had somehow reset outside of normal parameters and the BC consequently had a bit of confusion, causing the displays to go crazy.
Not sure if this is useful to anyone, but hope it can help someone out if they get the same issue after a battery change.
And in case anyone wants to try it, this is where the battery is located