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?