My brother brought his favourite music system to me for repair. The unit clearly has a bit of history and was showing visible corrosion on its tactile switches.

These common tactile switches are popular in almost every consumer product because they are very cheap and have a nice clicky feel when pressed. Internally, they are just a curved disk of springy metal that bridges an outer contact to an inner contact when pressed.
You can get a huge range of plunger sizes in this package format.

These switches are notorious for failure over time. They may initially respond to being wiggled while being pressed, but will finally stop making contact at all due to surface corrosion of the contacts.
Another major issue with these is the growth of conductive tracks or whiskers between the contacts, resulting in random self-switching effects.

One of the first tests you should do when a piece of equipment stops responding to one of these buttons being pressed is to bridge it out with a bit of wire to see if the equipment responds. Note that in some equipment these switches may be referenced to the mains supply, so treat them as being live if you can't guarantee they are fully isolated from the mains supply.

These are very commonly available, either in bulk packs from the usual online sources or individually from electronic distributors in your country. I'm not sure how much of a quality range there is.

I did have an issue after soldering these in, where I discovered that the pack of ten switches had a tiny difference in button height, and the "soft touch" buttons on the music system didn't quite press them far enough to click. I added a tiny dab of UV cured resin onto the ends of the short ones, and that domed them up high enough to register presses.

If you repair stuff a lot it's worth getting a mixed pack of generic tactile switches from an online supplier.



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