Dead kit

Been having a spot of trouble recently, with my Slim Devices Transporter.   It is a streaming audio player; it reads the files from my file server and plays them over the stereo.

A few months ago it stopped working.  It wasn't finding the files on the server.   Tech support were helpful - it was due to an "upgrade" of the software on the server, that meant that the Transporter no longer worked.   This was deemed acceptable as an "end of life" process for the device.  It was about ten years old, and physically working fine, so that kind of thing annoys me.  We fixed the problem by "downgrading" to the software that actually worked, and all was well for a while.

More recently a mains power outage and surge fried my friend's boiler's circuits just down the road, and shortly afterwards when I try to use the Transporter, it doesn't work, again.  Wierd fault: the vu meter needles move so it thinks it's playing something, but nothing's coming out of the audio outputs. Not electrical digital, not optical digital not analogue audio.   I tried everything I could think of.

It was only when I had disconnected it from my stereo in preparation for chucking it out, that I thought I'd do one last test, since what I hadn't done up to that point was disconnect it from the mains and reconnect it.  It's one of those things that doesn't have a proper mains switch, but goes into standby mode when you turn it off, ready to respond to a remote control.  So I plugged it back it, and blow me down, it worked.

But I think it's trying to tell me that I need to start thinking about alternative arrangements for my stereo.