For the past several months our A/V sound system has been randomly dropping it's centre channel.

With the recent dramatic and loud failure of the flatscreen TV all the components are pulled out as everything it rewired, dusted and tweaked.

So I took the opportunity to take the cover off the amplifier and do some poking around.

Under this board is a relay which was triggering in a random fashion. Its output is the centre front and centre back.

Over the past decades I've found bad (cold or dry) solder welds on a myriad of devices, more-so with no-lead solder.

So I grabbed my compact microscope and started looking at each weld and found a joint that looks like this.

http://www.tegger.com/hondafaq/main.....tion/james.jpg

So, before breakfast, here I was with solder and iron in hand.

The bright, shiny (and a bit obese) weld in the very centre of the photo was the fix of all the bad behavior on this component.

On my profile page I have this:

"In other words, if it stops working, I grab my DVOM and a soldering iron instead of just throwing the device out."