What happened to my HDMI inputs?

muncybob

Last weekend while I was out of town the Mrs was watching tv on our 42" Vizio(6 yrs old) and a storm came thru that disrupted power for a short period. We then started having trouble getting a signal from the sat tv receiver. Was initially able to get signal from the dvd player but as of yesterday I cannot get a signal into any of the 4 hdmi jacks. I am able to get signal thru component jacks though. Any idea what happened?
The tv has a nice picture with lots of adjustments in the menu to fine tune. Picked up a cheap tv last night until I decide what to do with the old one and it's a bare bones set. It has only 6 different factory settings for picture, remote is a joke and I can't seem to get my harmony to control anything on it other than sound. I'm guessing it will be cost prohibitive to get the old set repaired?

pitdogg2

HDMI board got fried most likely.

tonyb

Yeah, most likely the HDMI board went south. Cost to repair.....who knows until you ask a repair shop. Only thing is, you may not notice anything else that might have been fried until you repair the HDMI board. Don't you have your TV plugged into a surge protector ? If not, this is the exact reason why you should.

muncybob

It's strange how not all the inputs went at 1 time, no? I thought it was plugged into a surge protector of some sort..it's def something I'll be looking into. One the one hand I want to repair it as the picture is(was) better than the one I picked up but I also realize there is likely very little if any warranty coming with the repair and I don't know what else may have been affected.

Prior to the storm the signal would sometimes be lost when changing channels. Required turning off the sat receiver and back on again to the point that hdmi1 port was eventually inoperable and I switched to another. I guess it was on it's way out and whatever surge we got did it in.

pitdogg2

If the HMDI was coming directly off a Dish receiver its hard to protect. For some reason Dish highly recommends to NOT have them on any surge protector. I just unplug mine during storms. It could also be in the Dish Box and NOT the TV. That would then be the reason all on the TV are seeing no signal

muncybob

DirecTv did send me a new receiver and I'll try that(of course I will then have to manually input all the shows we record, set up favorites, etc. all over again....uggh!), but now even the dvd player is not getting signal to the tv.

I did a little digging and the main board can be fairly easily taken out and that part is still available for around $100. I guess I know what I'll be doing this weekend.

pitdogg2

well then get on it That my friend is called luck. With my Dish I can transfer all the fav. rec. to my remote and it will flash back to the new Hopper. Agree its a PITA if you cannot do that with the remote take a picture. I can NEVER remember all my recording timers

stones89

Muncybob - that has happened to me on 2 TV’s.

mantis

HDMI is 5v. Anything over that and they blow. I've seen it many times, to many actually.

muncybob

So, the main board is either very expensive or not available. I did find several places that will repair? Pull the board, pack properly, pay $65-$85 and hope they can fix it. Some say if they can't that you'll get at least a partial refund....anybody ever try this?

Oh, the You Tube videos make it look so easy to disconnect the wires, apparently the vids were of newer/better boards...mine are some connections that I'm not gonna mess with, will have to take it to a shop to have disconnect I guess.

Gatecrasher

I had a very similar thing happen to me in 2014. A lightning strike hit the cable TV line and fried the cable box, my new Sharp 60" Aquos TV, and the HDMI board out of my Pioneer SC-09TX AVR.

The following story is a little long but was a valuable learning experience (for me at least).

I had all the power cords from my AV equipment routed through a surge protector but didn't have the cable TV coax going through it.

I had the cable company (Charter) come out to get to the bottom of what happened. The technician replaced the cable box and after some testing made some upgrades to the ground on my line.

Fortunately the TV was 11 months old and still had 30 days left on the warranty. I bought it from Best Buy so I took it back to them. The Best Buy policy is they try to repair it or will refund the entire cost of the TV. My TV was deemed too expensive to repair so I received a full refund (store credit). What was really cool was the TV cost $1,800 and in just a year $1,800 got me a whole lot more TV than it did the previous year so I ended up getting an even better 60" Sharp Aquos. No complaints there.

That left my $7,000 Pioneer receiver to contend with. Everything still worked on it except the HDMI inputs. The warranty was expired on the receiver so I took it to a certified Pioneer repair center in St. Louis. They told me it would cost around $900 to replace the board. I about dropped right there but really like the AVR (and still do) so I told them to go ahead with the repair.

Since the SC-09TX is kind of unique, the board had to be ordered direct from Pioneer in Japan. It took about 4 weeks for the shop to get it and repair the AVR. When I got it home everything worked except it had an error message on the screen that said "Model ID Error". Well some people might have just let that slide since everything else worked but not me. For that kind of money I wanted it 100% with no error messages so I took it back!

The shop ordered a second HDMI board from Pioneer and it had the same error message. At that point they told me that was the best they could do and offered no further options. Basically I was SOL.

Well I didn't give up. It had been almost 3 months since the lightning strike and I wanted my AVR fixed right! I had already paid almost $900 and it still wasn't totally right.

My only other option was to contact Pioneer direct so I sent an email to customer service. They told me there was nothing they could do. After going through all of this I wasn't about to give up just yet so I decided to try one more time to get some kind of positive response. I went to the Pioneer corporate website and looked for the names of the CEO, the VP of quality and a few other top executives.

Having been in contact with Pioneer customer service, I had a good idea of how their email addresses were setup so I plugged the names of these big shots into the same format and fired-off an email to them demanding they make good on this customer service issue. I didn't use profanity but made it clear I was a pissed-off loyal Pioneer customer with a $7,000 receiver I had just dumped another $900 into.

Well to make a long story short, the next day I received a reply from customer service and they told me to take the AVR back to the repair shop and they would send a different HDMI board. A couple weeks later I got the call that it was ready for me to pick up. When I got it home it was finally fixed correctly!! Pioneer wrote me a nice letter apologizing for the inconvenience and told me there had been a problem with the other two boards and that they had sent me an upgraded brand-new version.

I was finally happy! My system was back to 100% ... but I wasn't quite done yet.

The next (and final step) of this exercise was to go after Charter for the cost to repair the AVR since they didn't have their cable line grounded properly. Fortunately I had saved the repair receipt from when the Charter technician came out to check everything and replace the cable box. On the receipt it clearly stated that there was a problem with an insufficient ground.

About a week later I received a check in the mail from Charter for $865.53 paying for the repair to the SC-09TX.

It was a lot of work but worth all the leg work in the end. Not only financially - it was also the principal.

I ended-up with a nicer TV and my AVR working as good as new for zero dollars other than the gas I used taking the AVR back and forth to the repair shop.

Ever since then I have had the cable line going through the surge protector too. I can't be 100% certain that it would have prevented the damage but it sure wouldn't have hurt.

A nice surge protector is worth it's weight in gold.

Here was the repair receipt from the HDMI board that I was reimbursed for by the cable company:

muncybob

That there is the definition of persistence.