I was surprised to find a fully fleshed out service manual available for a Marantz AVR receiver, complete with troubleshooting steps, screenshots of oscilloscope readings, flow charts and board diagrams.

This SR6011 had issues with displaying video out of the main HDMI port. A factory reset actually made the problem worse because the unit requires a first time setup via a display on the TV!

I found the setup screen inoperable, unable to change the language or navigate. After some trial and error I found I could quickly navigate through the HDMI sources and outputs for several seconds on startup before “SETUP – USE TV” showed up on the receiver. I used this to switch the ZONE2 output. Following through the troubleshooting steps with some voltage readings and oscilloscope probes the problem was narrowed down to the HDMI upscaling chip near the HDMI port on the back of the receiver. One of the HDMI pins that detects whether a HDMI plug is inserted should have been a 5V line, but was instead shorted to ground! The traces appeared to be intact, so the short was likely inside the HDMI chip.

I searched for the chip and found an online retailer, unfortunately the chip arrived with a bunch of pins bent due to improper packaging but I was able to straighten most of them out.

After replacing the chip with a hot air station and careful manipulation of the bent bins to make solid contact with the pads navigation on the setup screen started working. The receiver lives again with a $60 part and an hour of troubleshooting. Without right-to-repair this wouldn’t have been possible!