As a Norwegian who's been visiting the US for quite a few times now (as we speak), I've always appreciated the "hello, please, thank you", but what really gets me are the incessant "how are you"s.

I agree however that indiscriminately throwing ferrites at problems can be a good solution!

I just know that if I handed over something with such shoddy soldering to a customer, I'd lose my job or at the very least lose soldering privileges. But I am working with things that cost slightly more than 99$ that you can't find on store shelves :)

I don't agree with that sentiment. Their designs are subpar and the quality of the soldering is (maybe was) unacceptable:

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/h...

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/b...

The above review specifically goes into the problem from OP.

There's also their amplifier with a rather non-standard architecture that tries to solve a non-problem (injecting feedback in a NFB loop - I might remember wrong, if so, forgive me) which leads to it measuring double digit (!) THD if you feed it a sine wave. I'm not an experienced engineer but it is IMO a non-starter to have an amplifier try to decide what is and isn't a musical signal as part of its protection circuitry, short of detecting DC offsets or shorts (pun not intended). I'm not in the market for a 1800$ amplifier that goes bzzzt if you feed it music it disagrees with [1]

https://www.stereophile.com/content/schiit-audio-ragnarok-in...

>Noise from using USB power delivery for audio devices is common.. that’s why you can (and should) use the dedicated power input to you DAC/amp

I don't disagree with your point. However, a company designing products like these should be able to design a filter for this usecase unless you're trying to use your DAC as a a measuring device, or there is something seriously wrong with your motherboard. I honestly haven't heard of any other brand product with this problem unless it's ~20 years old and in need of repair. It doesn't cost much in the BOM, however it does cost in engineering hours/competence and QA and this is something that should have been caught by the latter.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzMbY4sZvIw

Edit: I just want to add that I don't want to hate on Schiit. Honestly I'd like new audio companies to succeed and I applaud them for rejecting MQA back in the day and for not going all-in on the audiofool bullshit one sees too much of. But seeing such poor engineering and QA leaves a sour taste in my (electronics engineering) mouth. Maybe they have improved lately, I wouldn't know. I'm not really in their market anyways.

It was mesmerizing to look at all the beautiful equipment and meet all the cool people there. I've forgotten his name, but I spent at least one hour with an ex-Tektronix employee who started his career with tubes and ended it with writing FPGA code who told me many wonderous stories from his career. Highly recommended if you're at all into electronics!

Some municipalities also have a separate property tax which iirc is usually an order of magnitude lower than the wealth tax.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Citizens%27_Initiativ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_initiative

It's not like it's banned or anything, it's just not allowed to be used in (most) consumer electronics.

For the record (heh) I also have an extensive vinyl/tape/CD collection in addition to a few TB of pirated FLACs.

The only types where I'd reach for a heat gun are packages like TO-252 and TO-263 where the backside is soldered directly to a pad on the PCB, but for hobbyist purposes I think even that could be doable with a powerful iron and a large tip.