I bought a PlayOn HD2 in February but have recently given it to a friend and reluctantly gone back to my original unit because I was having ongoing problems with it (made much worse by retailers in SIngapore declining to handle returns, you need to return the unit to the service centre which is only open 9-5 Mon to Fri which means taking time off work each way).

In general I thought the unit was good (although sluggish) but the problem I was having is that it was incredibly sensitive to disturbances on the mains supply. For instance if I switched my aircon on when it was playing it would hang and I would have to disconnect the power momentarily to reset it, the off switch on the unit and remote control would have no effect. The problem was infuriating in the evening when my neighbours were switching appliances on. The consequence of this was that over time the hard disk seemed to be getting corrupted and after a while the unit wouldn't boot at all and I would have to repeatedly switch on and off and eventually it might do a lucky start. The only thing to do then was a disk reformat which would completely fix all problems for a week or so when it would start getting worse again. At first I blamed the WD 1.5TB HDD but when I put this into a NAS drive it worked normally with no problems at all and is still going strong so the problem appears to be with the media player.

Perhaps the development team needs to do more work on transient immunity testing (IEC 61000) before releasing a product like this to the market.

Just curiosity: did you try your old HD1's power supply with your HD2? I guess it is rather the power supply than the unit itself, which is sensitive to fluctuations of the mains' voltage and does not keep the 5 volt output stable.

You might consider a UPS (uninterrupted power supply) between the mains and your computer equipment. These also absorb fluctuations of the mains.

Thanks for the reply. The early unit I've gone back to isn't an AC Ryan, for sure it's not as nice to use as the AC Ryan but it is very stable. The AC Ryan power supply is a 12V 2A plug type which seems to be pretty common these days and I have other 12V 2A power supplies for other devices which I tried with the Playon HD2 and which gave similar results. I think you're right and a UPS would crack the problem but this might cost as much as the player.

Probably a mains filter would work as well but this is not guaranteed and I decided I'd already spent a lot of time nursing this player and it was time to cut my losses. It would be great if AC Ryan were able to reproduce the problem at their end and introduce a fix. I think they need to look at it because I actually had a PlayonHD2 unit for two days and then got it replaced when I first noticed the problem and the replacement had the same problem.

I know there exist 12 Volt DC voltage stabilizers or regulators, also as DIY kits, but I do not know if these also boost up an input voltage below 12 V. These must be less expensive anyhow than a UPS. Just Google and you will find them.

Thanks. I didn't have a scope available to check if there was any dip in the 12V when the mains disturbances occur. My guess is there wasn't any and the plug PSU chugged on just fine. I think it's more likely to be a common mode noise problem which would require a common mode filter. There probably isn't room to put this into the plug PSU and that way pass the job onto the PSU maker, so I think the job should be with AC Ryan to include any counter-measure in their unit. I decided it wasn't worth the hassle of spending more time to try to fix it myself or expecting a fix for an unknown problem from the service centre.

12V regulators are probably linear which the audiophiles would like but you'd need more than 12V to drive one, so would need to change the supply. An power supply change is a major change.

I know you have given up, but http://www.dealextreme.com/p/24v-3a-regulated-switching-power-supply-100-240v-66679