Hey, thanks Rob!

A couple of additional notes from my personal experience:

- You don't need to install the hard drives to unit-test the newly installed encoder. If you have Hijack installed on your player, you need only to plug in the display board and add power. It will boot to the "no hard disk found contact support" screen, but even on that screen Hijack works and you can bring it up with the longpress, and test the knob-twist from there.

- Mk2 (SMT): If you *do* end up peeling a pad off the board in the process , find the spot on the board that its trace leads to, where it goes into one of the holes to pop through to the other side of the board. Scrape the copper-lined edges of this hole gently with an x-acto to get the protective coating off and make the copper shiny. Find a very fine wire (I unwound some heavy-gauge stranded copper speaker wire and used one of the strands) and put it through the hole. Then flux both sides and apply solder. Trim the back side. The remaining wire extending from the front side now replaces your lost pad. Note that it's a multilayer board, so do this even if it looks like the hole doesn't go anywhere on the other side of the board.

The blue ones have a "softer" rotary action and a longer "push" than the green ones, and I personally prefer the blue to the green.

Don't you mean it the other way around?

For me, the through-hole (green Mk2a) encoder has a less-clicky (less noisy) rotary action and feels like what I would describe as "softer" when I turn it. Although its resistance to accidental turns is greater; I have to exert a bit more deliberate force to turn the knob than on the Mk2 encoder (this is a feature I like). Also, its "push" requires more deliberate force as well, and clicks more positively, but I don't know about "longer". Again, I like this feature since it reduces the number of times I accidentally push the knob when I'm trying to adjust the volume.

Rob, can you think of anything I might do during this procedure that would cause the display to be dimmer? (Other than plugging in the header wrong an blowing a fuse, which I did not do.) At one point, I powered it up to test and the display was noticeably dimmer. Then later, I tried it again and the display was fine. Now, this morning in the car, I'm second-guessing myself as to whether or not thing is as bright as it was yesterday.