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Post subject: Passport mini shutting itself off
Posted: Wed Jul 18, 2018 3:32 am
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Hobbyist
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Joined: Wed Jul 18, 2018 3:23 am
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I've been using a Passport mini for busking for a while and I have this problem that's been getting progressively worse. For no apparent reason and at irregular intervals (once every 1 to 15 minutes) it will shut itself off when running on batteries. Sometimes it will shut off completely and sometimes the display lights stay on but the sound cuts out. This happens whether the batteries are new or not, and with multiple different instruments and cables, with pedals and without.

Has anyone else had this same problem? Is there a fix for it?


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Post subject: Re: Passport mini shutting itself off
Posted: Wed Aug 08, 2018 7:23 am
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Aspiring Musician
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Joined: Wed Feb 16, 2011 7:24 am
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Two potential causes come to mind:

1. The amp overheats. A thermal circuit breaker cuts the unit off until it cools off.
2. The voltage gets too low to drive the electronics. Since it's a digital amp, it doesn't do this gracefully. There's no noise or fade out. It just suddenly stops working until the voltage goes back up again.

If you are playing it with the unit sitting in direct sunlight, suspect problem 1. Find a shade of some sort for the unit, or otherwise work on the environment of the unit so it doesn't overheat so much.

You are using batteries. Your voltage level is going to vary based on both supply (how new or newly recharged are the batteries?) and demand (if you crank the volume way up, you increase demand and lower the voltage of the system - and the louder the notes you play, the lower the voltage goes). Back off on the volume some and see if that makes the problem happen less often.

Basically, you can't expect as much from batteries as you get from AC power. There's a lot less amperage flowing from the batteries than from AC power, and when your wattage demand goes up, it sucks down the volts faster on batteries than it does on the grid.

Meanwhile, it's not that easy to know which of these is the problem because I suspect that you never put the unit in direct sunlight if you are plugged into AC power. The unit suffers the greatest stress when you are playing from batteries while in a hot environment, especially in direct sunlight where you get high air temperature AND radiant heat from the Sun.

There's also a third possibility of the unit failing because of some flaw, but if that's the case, odds are the problem will stop being intermittent and start being permanent. It'll burn out and never play again.


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