A couple of years ago I bought an Eltax Mediaboxx. It’s not at all bad, but suffers from an anoying tendency to skip on less-tahn-perfect discs. I’d wondered about trying to cure this, so when a faulty unit (without the speakers) came up on the bay of E, I put in a bid, and won it for 11 quid including the carriage.

My sole plan was to rob the optical drive from it, which I did. The reported fault was distorted sound. In fact, it was a bit worse than that: a rather unpleasant buzzing noise, ripples in the picture, and a different type of skipping problem. This turned out to be the capacitor issue again, as discussed here. The smoothing cap for the PSU had popped, and others were on the way. Now, in theory, I could repair the amp, put the old drive in (it works most of the time), and have another unit, but wether I ever do that or just chuck the remains…I’m convinced the skipping of the ‘new’ unit was due to poor PSU regulation- we’ll see.

The thing is, I’d thought the capacitor plague problem had gone away- but this unit was manufactured in 2004. Looks like it will run and run.