[KhaosKid]

Hey guys so I had a problem with my E90 where the speakers would produce a sound like a fax machine, or like my car was communicating with aliens everytime I entered the car even if the key wasn't in. As long as the car electronics were on it would play the sound even with the headunit turned off!

I got so frustrated with this problem and learned there was a TSB (Technical service bulletin) that addresses the problem but since my car was out of warranty I wanted to try something else before spending the money to get a new headunit

I read a thread on the forums about a guy taking out his radio and one of the female sockets for the wire (the socket attatched directly to the headunit) was loose. I used superglue to secure the socket so it didn;t have any play, which worked decently well but still has a bit of play. The guy in the video apparently compressed the metal to hold it in place better? When I put the headunit back in, I made sure to pull the wires from the headunit down so they were taut through the hole created when you remove the climate control switches (which you have to do before you remove the headunit). Now my speakers don't play the wierd alien sound, and my left side speakers stop going out when I hit pot holes.

Will update this thread if anything breaks down so we can see how reliable doing this fix is.



P.S. there are videos online showing how to remove the headunit, You gotta use ideally plastic pry tools to remove the climate control panel. You want to pull 2/3 up from the bottem with constant pressure until it unclips. You have to pull it kind of hard to get it out though, i felt like i was going to break it but didn't.

Then you remove two phillips head screws and pull headunit out and inspect which of the two wires with the small 1cm/1cm cube connector is bad. For me since my left side was losing signal every once in a while I knew this was the problem wire. Remember to pull the wires from the headunit down and taut from the climate control region that was a must for me else the signal wouldn't be clean.

Let me know if this works for you by posting a response. Would lose some people to share their experience and get rid of the annoying buzz if they can!

UPDATE ( 07/22/2016) : its been almost two months and the fix is still working

UPDATE: after a few months, the fix stopped working. I ended up buying a professional radio off eBay from a car of the same model year as mine (2011), but I made sure the production date was a few months after mine (mine was November 2010) , hoping they fixed the issue in the later production dates. Apparently I was right to assume that because it’s been 5 years and the problem has never came back. Just updating this because I forgot to back then.