MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin - An MP3 player story...

In our family of four we have four 4GB Sansa Fuze MP3 players. We got them in December 2008. They have all been used quite a bit.

One day my 12 year old daughter comes to me with her player. The screen was completely white. She said she did not drop it or anything. It just happened. I popped it apart to make sure the ribbon cable was still plugged in and it was. I read online that it might be fixed if I update the firmware. So, I tried that. Screen still white. Me, being the great dad that I am, gave her mine. A couple of weeks later she tells me that it got squished when someone pushed a piece of furniture into her bag containing the MP3 player. The headphone jack got screwed up pretty bad. I was able to take the LCD from that one and put it in her original player and it now works.

Unfortunately this left me with a player that had a bum LCD and headphone jack. So I went on eBay and found an 8GB player that was listed as-is with the buttons not working. I won the auction for $1 + $5 shipping. I got it today and sure enough the scroll wheel and buttons did not work. At least the LCD did work. I popped it apart and found the ribbon cable for the scroll wheel was either loose or not plugged in at all. I plugged it in, which BTW is a real bitch. It is about 1/4" long and there is no room to hold it in place and close the latch. Anyway it sort of worked but was intermittent. I was able to play music, but there was something wrong with the headphone jack. It didn't seem to have a ground connection. I took a screwdriver and touched the metal part of the jack to the metal part of the 30-pin connection port. The sound came alive and it sounded like it was supposed to. I ended up soldering a small jumper between the 2 metal parts because I couldn't figure out why the ground was bad. Headphone jack fixed!

Now back to the scroll wheel connector. After screwing around with it for a while, I realized there was a small adhesive backed rubber insulator that seemed to be pushing up on the ribbon. I took a flat blade screwdriver and pushed it down to compress it into a corner. This gave just a little more clearance for the ribbon cable. It reconnected the ribbon and the scroll wheel is now working! Yeah!

I basically got an 8GB Sansa Fuze for $6. Now, I need to find another one to donate a headphone jack and LCD for my original Sansa Fuze!