To start with I want to commend Oculus for providing RMAs for some
people with this issue who are outside of their warranty period. This is excellent customer service and a great way to keep brand loyalty and trust in the Rift as a whole. I feel
bad for those you have denied though for whatever reasons you have. It
is pretty unfair that apparently through no fault of their own their
Rift audio has died without any chance of repair or an option to buy a
replacement ribbon cable to attempt repair themselves.
Can Oculus give us some information about why this is happening to some users?
Is
it a fault with some Rifts during manufacturing or are the users doing
something that increases the chance of this internal ribbon cable tearing?
Is there anything we can do to avoid this happening to us?
Should we be avoiding stretching the headband springs too much?
This
is pretty critical because Oculus still have no paid spare parts or
repair service. If we inadvertently break our Rifts through normal use
when out of warranty we are shit out of luck and have to buy a brand new
headset or switch to an external set of headphones. Unless of course your support staff decide to provide an RMA outside of warranty which appears to be about a 50/50 chance from the 36 posts I read.
I did some
searching on this topic on both reddit and these forums and found about
36 posts on the topic since June 2016. 16 of these posts occurred in the
last 3 months so it appears to be something that is getting worse with
time. If this happens to more and more people when out of warranty this
is going to be a large PR problem. That said 36 posts of the however
many tens/hundreds of thousands of Rifts out there is quite small in the
big scheme of things too. Having a way to fix it ourselves by buying
a part if out of warranty would be great for piece of mind though.
Do you have any plans for spare parts service?
Some clarity on the issue would be great to be sure we treat our expensive excellent VR device with the care it deserves.
Possible causes
I'm
wondering if the underlying cause is the tension springs in the
headband itself somehow catching on this internal ribbon cable causing it to
tear. Maybe repeated stretching of the headband springs over time causes
the ribbon cable to move into a position where it can tear inside the
headstrap?
Springs here
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Oculus+Rift+CV1+Teardown/60612#s126787Springs in action as this person stretches the tension springs to put it on
https://j.gifs.com/AnBwW3.gifIf
this is known to cause the problem could Oculus let us know so we
stop doing it as much. I'd much prefer to avoid doing whatever it is
that can cause this ribbon cable to tear than run the risk of it happening when I get
out of warranty.
Some pics of the torn ribbon cable from various postshttps://forums.oculus.com/community/discussion/comment/525398/#Comment_525398https://forums.oculus.com/community/discussion/comment/531518#Comment_531518
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