Drat, a ripped up Becker changer cable
 

The Becker Silverstone 980 in the 500E quit last year; I ended up opening and fixing it myself. It's been fine since. But one of the two DIN cables looked screwy at the pin head at the time: one of the two pieces of the metal collar was always falling out. When carefully reinserted, it worked fine.

The changer suddenly wouldn't eject this week, so I freed it from the mount. The suspect DIN fell apart in my fingers as I prised it out -- four of the wires inside have come away from their solder points in the pin head. A-ha!

I suppose I've got two options here. One is to fix this cable up, but I would need to know the pinout. The other is to just get a new cable of appropriate spec -- whether from MBNA or Becker, I am not sure.

Figuring out the pinout and resoldering and putting the pin head back together sounds ugly. But so does replacing a cable run all the way from the headend to the trunk!

Any advice for the sonically bereft?

s/b

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I recommend calling becker parts, telling them your situation, and getting a new connector end. Either solder it or use some butt or 3m connectors to replace. Of course, solder is best.

Willy

I recommend calling becker parts, telling them your situation, and getting a new connector end. Either solder it or use some butt or 3m connectors to replace. Of course, solder is best.


I did call Becker, but they didn't give me an option to order a connector end. They quoted me a new CD changer cable at $44 plus shipping.

I'll probably just do that. Fifty bucks plus cable routing time is still less trouble than trying to figure out the pinout and do the resoldering. And it would let me run new parallel cable for later upgrades while I'm in there.

Actually, I do have a fresh DIN connector here that I could use to replace the old one (a bit awkwardly, the base orientation is different). But that would be contingent on knowing the pinout and wire color codes.

s/b

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