Those are the GROUND and right channel that were poorly connected. The ground came off only by gently moving the wire to the side. Makes sense that the unit gets damaged there is a very poor common ground connection. Don't waste your money with DAC deals on massdrop

...So since I'm the owner of a new desktop paperweight I took a look at the problematic unbalanced input from the inside. There is photo showing the solder connections for the unbalanced jack. The wires the we're in place were so thin and soldered at such a high temp that two of them came undone just from removing the board with very little force (I clipped where they were connected to the main PCB.) For comparison there is a 0,5mm pencil lead in the photo. Unfortunately removing the unbalanced jack didn't fix the problem... I've read through many of the other DAC drops and there are some that are full of problems. Even worse is when they sell you a poorly manufactured product without a warranty, and the only products that actually have more than 30 days warranty list it as a feature. Ridiculousness... tfn [image]

Poor build quality, Drop and SMSL no help with warranty When I first received the unit I very briefly listened to the unbalanced output with inexpensive headphones to make sure everything is in order. Sound was not that great but no real issues and only wanted it for the dual mono balanced output headphone out really. I've only listened to the balanced output and haven't had any issues. Fast forward around six months until now and I want to use the DAC as a source so i decide to do some tests. There was something wrong with the output relay on the unbalanced side and after running through some pink noise, brownian noise, and a few sine waves a 1kHz sine wave was looking like a square wave. The worst part is now the sound on the balanced output is now grossly distorted as well. Testing an output with no load with a different protection relay shouldn't damage a different output with a different relay. So I contact SMSL. They say contact the original seller, which is massdrop. Massdrop support says only returns or exchanges for the first thirty days?!? So they are basically saying no warranty... would have never purchased this DAC with a THIRTY DAY WARRANTY 🤦‍♂️. Massdrop never again. SMSL never again. Too sketchy. [image]