jim wrote:

Hi,

Has anyone experienced this problem? The set was made in July 2000. When I try to turn it on, the standby light blinks several times, I hear a few clicks, but I get no sound or picture. I can tell that the high voltagte does not come on. I had it repaired and it worked for 8 days and then went back to this. Then I discovered that if I unplugged the set overnight, it would come on the next day; but if I turned it off then it would fail again. Now it won't come on at all.


I had just the opposite problem. 3 years ago on my Sony 36xbr250
I discovered that if I had the set unplugged for a while, when it
was plugged back in it would turn on immediately. If you turned
it off, a second later it would come back on. The set had to be
left on for an hour or so before the standby circuitry was stable
enough to keep the set off when it was turned on. Now 3 or 4
months ago it started randomly turning on in the middle of the
night or whenever maybe 3 times a week. Since I had a 5 year
extended warranty with about 9 months left on it from Circuit
city I called them.

To make a long story short, the tech sent out determined that the
main processor board need to be replaced (per Sony's directive).
Made sense to me since I have a schematic and the main trigger
for the relays comes directly from the processor chip. They
initially thought it was the power relays since they have had
some history of them going bad and "sticking" in one position.
However, since the re-power-up was being delayed, Sony claimed
that it was the processor board. Sony spent over two months
trying to find a replacement board for me and couldn't (while my
set sat on the front room floor). CC finally granted me an
exchange on a new 36 inch set with a new 5 year in home warranty
that seems really fair (essentially they have given me it all at
their cost equivalent to what I paid for my set nearly 4.5 years
ago-around $1800). If I hadn't had that warranty I'd be up the
creek since Sony can't find the parts (and that was a popular set too!).

I'm not sure that this is of much help other than if you do have
a schematic for the xbr400, you could put a meter on the
processor output drive for the power switching an see if it looks
healthy or not. If it is, you might be lucky and it could be one
of the "sticky relays" that I've hear about.

- Jeff