Just got a 2008 S550 With Harmon sound. I hear a bit of weird crackling in sound system, not sure what it could be.
Also, the mouse ( controller) is erratic when trying to control Audio portion, the selection keeps jumping from one to another and I can not program presets or select channels, its keeps bouncing.

Any clues? Thank you advance.

 

on earlier cars (w220) I think the system can fail with strange noises, never heard of that on this much different system.... these all die with no sound.

So I wonder if its been abused and that the actual speakers are blown - these cars with the base or the bigger amp really have only one third of the power required to get good quality noise and not destroy the speakers. The world has moved to compressed rubbish where much of the difficult stuff has been ejected and it means weak feeble amps and budget speakers survive and in some ways at low volume levels sounds OK, it means the accountants can spec budget stuff, especially when they can also have systems to try and wind back clipping in the electronics (see below), but you can still overdo it and damage nearly any system

transient spikes are what's is in real music and these cause speakers to (literally) have a melt down - if you have a 1000 watt amp and 20w speakers the world is good and the sound quality high. Because the amp is in control all day long and the speakers always do what the music said.

when you do 100w speakers and 10w amp it sounds awful and its easy to kill the speakers - because these speakers demand lots of grunt to get them to sing, but the amp can't provide it. So the sound is nasty and rather quiet. So you wind up the vol and now the amp is throwing out, out of control junk signals way past its bed time. Whilst the speakers went louder it was more muddled, so to make things seem less bad you wind up the vol some more.... (any amp past 1/3rd vol is beginning to run out of control), so in the situation I just mentioned we are probably now way over 60% vol and the amp is throwing utter rubbish of uncontrolled mess and the speaker ends up bouncing of its ends stops (clipping). Keep going and it damages the speaker drive unit, often getting rattly and in extremes just stops as the drive coils pop.

Usually some speakers die before the others, so if you can move the fade and balance about and work out if one speaker is nastier or making odd extras over and above another you can see if its the speaker rather than the rest of the components


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Hi, i have the same issue, random static noise andnthe menu is impossible to use as it jumps to another whilst static noise is there, did you figure out? Is it an amplifier issue?

 

Hello,

I believe the issue is with the control knob system. I am currently awaiting a new unit and I will post an update. The timing between the static spikes and the glitch in movement of the "mouse" control.

 

The issue was the fibre optic wire in the back of the trunk - I fixed it in 5 mins myself for $10!

this is the link to the video on how to replace it

 

Yup, you were correct. The odd occurrences I was facing with the "mouse" jumping which made selecting another menu screen difficult, was caused by the voice control module. Removing it from the system and using a fiber optic loop fixed the issue.




Simply unplug the cable from the module, carefully pull the tab on the side where the fiber optic cable is to release it from the clip. Place it into the purchased looping device and the system will then bypass the voice control module.

*Red is the fiber optic loop thats apart of the system thats been removed from the voice control module and inserted into the loop device*
*White is where it originally was*