Hi Gents,

Glad to be part of this forum. Just found it this weekend, despite that I've owned my Mk2 for 3 years now. Already installed the HiJack kernel - nice piece of work, by the way.

I had the HiJack kernel installed, everything working great with my unit as it always has. I was browsing through the FAQ and came across a manufacturing hardware bug that occurred with very early Mk2 units (which mine is) - a particular resistor near the Phillips DAC that is supposed to be 0 ohms, but was mistakenly 100 or 1000 ohms on some units, which decreased the stereo separation. I wanted to find out if my unit had this problem.

I opened the unit per instructions in the FAQ (I'm not new to that, I had to do it once before, as my unit was shipped with a disconnected IDE cable). I found and observed the resistor, and indeed, mine has a 1000 ohm resistor installed. I decided that fixing that would be a project for another day, so I reinstalled the drive sled and all other pieces of hardware, completely reassembling the unit.

When I got it back in the car, the output volume from the unit has gone noticably down. My system/amps are adjusted such that -35 dB volume is my normal comfortable listening level. But now, to get the same volume, I needed about -25 dB volume level.

I thought this might be just some sort of coincidence or problem in the car, but I hooked the L/R outputs on the back into my sound system at home (which I've done before) - volume is noticeably quieter there, too.

What could I have done? I was extremely careful while I was inside the unit, and didn't touch anything I wasn't supposed to. I opened the unit back up and verified no wires were pinched and all connectors look tight. Everything else on the unit is working fine - no error messages, all my playlists are there like they were before, no display problems, etc. Does anyone have any idea what could be wrong?

Assuming you were careful with the disassembly and reassembly, I can't think of anything that you could have done to change the output volume. I'd start looking for things in the software... such as having switched it to another equalizer preset for example.

Could it be in mute ? Or maybe the auto vol adjust turned on to max? Just some thoughts.

Thanks for replying, guys.

I have checked all of the obvious software things ... equalizer presets are where they were before. Volume is not muted (as far as I can tell ... there doesn't seem to be a mute function on the remote, and I don't have the cell phone mute wire hooked up as far as I know). Hijack's dynamic volume adjustment is turned off.

Here's a software possibility: Could the unit be in the "hushed" mode? Which lowers volume but doesn't mute?

Before this happened, one other thing I installed was the charcoalgray99 web interface (which is awesome). I also edited config.ini (using JEmplode) to add the [output] notify=1 lines at the bottom. That all went well. However, when you bring up the remote control on the http interface, it has a Rio remote, which has the hush function on the play button. Could I have hushed it from there without realizing it? I don't have an actual Rio remote, I have the Kenwood remote, which doesn't have the hush function.

Is there a diagnostic I can do to find out if the unit is in hushed mode? There is no "h" on the front display, so it shouldn't be, but who knows. If so, how can I unhush it without a real Rio remote (yes, I know, presumably the same way I hushed it, hehe). Of course, I don't know how I did it.

Just for kicks, I tried various edits of the config.ini file, including mute=0, mute=1, hushpercent=0, hushpercent=100. None made any difference.

Anything else I can try?