Well, not exactly possessed, but it sure is different from any other boombox I've ever had...

I plugged in a recently-acquired Sanyo M-9994K. This box is cosmetically in pretty good shape EXTERNALLY, so I thought it might be reasonably okay, internally. I expected maybe the cassette deck needed belts, or maybe some controls needed a little cleaning, but not much worse than that.

So I set the volume down and check the controls before turning it on, plug in the mains wire, and ... nothing. Not a peep, not a light, nothing. Uh-oh...seems DOA. At least no radio, which is what it was set to. I try the cassette controls to see if anything moves. Nothing does...

BUT!

...when I hit the "play" control on the cassette deck, I seem to hear some faint sound, like a radio. I then flip the radio/casssette selector over to radio, leaving the cassette PLAY button depressed, and I have full radio sound! Release the PLAY button, and the radio dies again.

Turns out that the PLAY control on the cassette deck functions exactly like a POWER on/off switch should! The tape deck doesn't work at all, but the play button allows me to turn the box (radio part) on and off. How wacky is that?

Then I test the other tone controls and such. Hhhmmmm, when I hit the loudness button, half of the tones drop out on one channel, and everything gets weaker and a bit weird-sounding. It's almost like the loudness control is "in reverse", but not quite.

Several of the functions on this box are like that... only some of the controls work the way they are supposed to!

I haven't opened it up, but it is almost as if some incompetent tech got a bunch of the wire connections mixed up inside. I've had boxes with scratchy controls, failing circuits and such, but never seen one as wacky as this one.

I think it is possessed!

When I have more time to open it up and work on figuring out what's going on inside, I'll post more in the Tech forum. Just hope I don't electrocute myself first by touching an antenna or something. For now, just thought I'd share this. Anyone else have "possessed" boxes with wacked-out controls with minds all their own?

Try this thread in the Tech Talk section. You might want to search that section for other threads containing the words "power" and "press play." This problem seems to come up fairly often. If I understood electronics, I'd help. Unfortunately, when it comes to electronics, I'm in a knowledge-free zone. But a number of members here are experts... thank goodness!

That sure does sound nutty! Hope you can get it sorted.

some of them and a sleep feture where you would actually play like a 30 min tape and it would play the radio till the tape stopped. it really seems like you just need to clean all the swiches and it might just come back to life.

Interesting thought, erniejade... if I follow you right, it could be "stuck" in "sleep" mode, then. Of course, the first step will be cleaning the controls. Have something else (non-boombox) on my bench now, though, so will not get back to it for a bit... but I'm hoping you are right. Would be nice if I could "exorcise" it with just a little DeOxit!