I have a loaded 2008 Cooper S that I got in March 2008. Every since delivery, I've had problems with the HD radio that the dealership says they cannot figure out (they actually suggested my asking around on a forum!). The issues began with periodic echoes. After taking the car in and having them check it out at 6 mos., they couldn't find any problems with it. Upon taking it home, not only did the echoes continue, but it began to switch from tuner to AUX (radio falls silent) all on its own. In addition, when I turn the tuner dial (or press the preset tuner buttons) to change the radio station from one preset to another, the station pops back to the original station. And, sometimes the station I have in the "preset 1" position will end up playing on "preset 5." The only way I have found to fix this last issue is to shut the car off and then to restart it. I would like to either get a new HD radio installed, or just get this thing ripped out and a regular radio put in (and a $500 refund), but the dealership is dragging its feet.

Has anyone had any similar problems or have suggestions as to what I should do? Thanks, Bobbi

 

I'm not an EE but it sounds like it's brains are scrambled; possibly a bad/non-existent ground caused some over voltage on those delicate digital circuits. Did you try the radio manufacturer's website/support?

 

Oooh... that's weird. I get a little echo when my local radio station goes in and out of HD on the days that the broadcasts aren't exactly in sync. It can get annoying, but luckily it doesn't happen all that often and I've never had anything like randon station changes happen. Good luck sorting it out!

 

my hd rad does this too; I took it into my dealer and they said it was normal I didn't believe them of course! so I MADE the service manager show me another car with HD and see if it echoe's or skips..... and it did too. so we tried another because it must just be a bad batch, but the 3rd one was the nail in the coffin that changed my mind and solidified it that its a signal issue.

hope this helps

 

The HD tuner is an add-on box at the rear of the car (N48 in the diagram below) that connects to the regular radio. You could ask the dealer to disconnnect it (or try it yourself, but a proper disconnection may also involve programming that only a dealer can do).

 

Disconnecting the box to disable the HD portion is probably too much work. You can turn it off if you like. There is an option to enable/disable it. I have the Nav system so couldn't really tell you where that is unless you've got the Nav too.

 

I sincerely appreciate everyone's responses!

I have not yet checked the HD radio manufacturer's website, but will certainly look into that (I first have to figure out who actually made it).

And rkw, thanks for the diagram -- I had no idea where it was located. However, I'm not a car mechanic by any means, so any work that's done on the car needs to be done by someone other than myself.

I would love to turn it off, but I don't have the NAV, so my guess is that it may be a different set-up than yours, Minidrivr. But thank you for the suggestion. I'll look into that.

However, don't you think that MINI service at the dealer should be responsible for figuring this out and fixing it? The car is not even a year old and they have basically taken themselves out of the loop by saying that they've never heard of this problem before, so I should post questions on a forum! I don't understand how they can do that when my car is certainly under warranty. Any additional suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks again to you all! Bobbi

 

Yes, absolutely! The auto-jumping of the settings is unacceptable and something must be malfunctioning. I think they should at least swap out the unit.

However, judging from the other posts, the echoing issue may indeed be "normal" for this unit and the dealer won't be able to resolve it by themselves. They need to escalate it up to MINI corporate, and ideally your dealer would be proactive about going through the process.

 

I've been having a lot of the same problems with my Mini HD radio - mode-hopping between digital and analog, digital artifacting, echoing, dropouts on the HD2/HD3 channels to silence, etc. Two law firms are soliciting consumer complaints about car HD radios:

http://representingpeople.com/hdradio/index.html

I just submitted my complaint.