OUCH, OUCH, OUCH my fairly new Shiit BF2 suddenly stopped working. I checked connections, powered down and up and tried different DAC to verify problem was not my source. After several tries and swapping out power chord, RCA’s, USB etc. I noticed unit was burning HOT to the touch and completely powered it off and pulled it from my rack. The thing smells like it caught fire inside! Yikes 
I just emailed Shiit to ask for assistance. Dammit, this is one of my favorite DAC’s 
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F
good luck
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I’m completely stumped on this one, nothing at all seems out of place, usually there is a reason, even stupid ones, that would cause a piece to short out. This thing just stopped playing in the middle of a song. I quadruple checked the power cord to make sure all was well within parameters and can’t find anything out of place. Anyone else burn up a Shiit Bifrost 2 or similar component? Anything i should look for?
There are limited possibilities.
Defective component - it will happen
Power surge of some sort - if you lose more than one component like this I’d seriously look at it.
hot plugging wires, flipping the power switch on and off – assuming you didn’t do that.
Down stream component suddenly trying to draw a lot more power – seems unlikely
Upstream component pushing out more voltage than it should - seems unlikely I assume connected via USB
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Yes it was connected via USB and simply in the middle of playing music. I think I may just be unlucky and had component failure. I know it is not normal but I was not fiddling with anything in the signal path when it happened and nothing else was affected.
Didn’t you have another component failure reasonably recently?
And I missed insufficient ventilation off the list.
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Yep, but i blew that amp up because i shorted a loose speaker wire 
. I swear i wasn’t messing with a single wire when the BF2 stopped playing.
I agree with all about sufficient airflow and i am pretty OCD about maintaining the flow of air.
So far, i have blown 2 headphones, 2 power amplifiers and now 1 DAC 
sheesh, i suck at this hobby! 
That’s rough. How did you manage to kill two headphones?
Hifiman HE6se because i had a bad connector on an RCA and I wiggled it. (that actually took me a while to figure out what happened) Fried my amp and the HP. Then the replacement i received was dead on arrival which necessitated another return.
Then I fried a second amp when one of my banana plugs was loose and pulled out the back of the speaker.
The other headphone was blown/fluttering when i got it but it was so light i could not verify until i drove it into the ground and then i blew it for sure.
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Was the Rca on the output side? I’m surprised a short on the input side could cause that
It being a BF2 can’t be that old, electronic stuff tends to die early or live to a ripe long age, there’s not a tendency for stuff to die in between those two but it does happen.
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The RCA was the input one and the screech it made when it jiggled was loud enough to Deafen someone. I heard it through the headphone and then everything just went dead My heart sunk that day thinking of how much money I just pissed away…It all turned out well and that pain passed too.
This too shall pass, but it really surprised me.
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I am very happy I have started keeping my original receipts inside my original boxes for products. I have needed a proper shipping container and original receipt for almost each busted item so far or I paid good money in repair services which well offset purchasing used or older items. It’s always a gamble with electronics, keep good records for your stuff or someday you will regret it and your wallet will hate you for being lazy…Shiit was VERY prompt today.
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I would realy like a look inside. But given it blew up and you don’t want to void the warranty…
Looking at pictures on Schiits website, the only components that could cause “thermal runaway” are the linear regulators. LDOs however do not fail like that (they throttle current/voltage when heating up). Wierd.
Yeah, it was NOT very exciting at all, usually there is cursing and hair pulling involved on my part. The music simply stopped playing in the middle of a song. I honestly thought the internet connection was down. It wasn’t till well into swapping cables later after re-setting everything that I felt the extreme amount of heat on the side of the unit where the cord plugs in and once i had it in my hands I put it up to my nose and the smell of something burnt inside was distinct. I have authorization to return it and it’s packed up and ready to go but now i too am curious to see what the hell burned up in there…
EDIT to add, the unit did NOT lose power or power down and will still turn on if i plug it in. That’s why I did NOT suspect the DAC till later on.
Could be the transformer.
Just send it back. Curiosity can only go so far.
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So, not to push alarm but i feel like there have been a few reports lately of BF2s hitting complications
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Ooof, the box wasn’t that big or heavy. Insured shipping was $34. This was a new unit only a few weeks old. This hobby costs way much!
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Bifrost2 is back from Shitt, bad weather delayed delivery a few days but no big deal, overall return time was pretty quick IMO. Waiting for it to come up to room temperature before I integrate it in a system somewhere, i do NOT want to risk anything at this point.
Repair note says burned out the analog card and transformer. 
wtf did i do? It was simply playing music then abruptly shut off in the middle of a song? I think this is one of the few failures ever of a brand new unit, don’t think i had 10hrs of playtime on it.
Looking forward to trying it out later today. Excellent experience with Shitt, my unit was new, and i had a receipt for it which they asked for. I had to pay the shipping out to California with $800 worth of insurance in case anything happened and it got lost.That would probably make this the most expensive new BF2 in North America 
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