Fingerbuttin'

Got called to help out a cousin today.  She lives down in Huguley and her problem was that she bought a stereo form "fingerbutt".  It was one of those deals where the payments was what she could handle but she'll be paying on it for the rest of her life.  The stereo in question is one with a turntable, tuner, twin cassettes, and three disc CD changer.  The problem was: No Sound.

She could get sound if she used the head-phones but in reality she just wanted something to be able to listen to her brother's old vinyl record collection and didn't want to have to set in one spot all the time while listening.  I arrived and the first thing was to check the speaker wire connection; they seemed good. Then I listen through the headphones to confirm that the unit was willing to put out sound and that the volume wasn't turned all the way down; that too was good.  Cuz had an old multi-meter of her brother's and I used that to first check the circuit of each speaker then to check for output from the speaker terminal.  The speakers checked out fine but no voltage was coming from the terminal.  Time to open that unit up.

I first took off the screws that held the back in place, pulled the back off and the first thing I notice was that the receptor on the inside for the speaker terminal wasn't plugged into anything.  Ok, lets now look for some loose wires.

After a couple of minutes I realize that there was no loose wires that hasn't been plugged in.  That's great, they forgot to put the wires in.  Sending the unit back to fingerbutt wasn't really an option since they charged $50 to return, even when it was one of their "screwups" {one of the many reasons why I tend to dislike fingerbutt}.  I proceeded to try and find where an empty socket on the amp was.  No luck.

Ya' got ta be kiddin' me!  They actually missed putting a socket for the speaker on the amp!

I then proceeded to "dig" farther into the guts of this stereo and found where the plug for the headphones was wired into the amp.  If nothing else I would tap some wires off the headphones.  I notice that next to where the headphone's plug was connected into the amp was another socket, with wires connected, that said, "FOR THE SPEAKERS".  These wires were going to the CD changer.  

O' boy...

I then proceeded to follow the wires and see what was hooked up incorrectly on the CD changer.  The wires disappeared into the unit and a gentle tug caused the end to pop out.  Not connected to the unit; these wires were just tucked into the changer.

{fingernbutt is right.  The assembler was doing that exact same thing when they were suppose to be putting this unit together; fingerbuttin'}

 Well, to shorten my story, these were the missing speaker wires and after plugging them into the terminal, and reassembling everything, the speaker worked.  

And here I was beginning to think I was getting into something major.