Well I got my Bottlehead crack working today, so far its awesome! I've only heard it so far with my work setup, line out on my Fiio E10 into the Crack and then into my DT770 250ohm and it was a big difference compared to just the E10. Looking forward to hearing my HD600 on this!
So as far as things that were wrong, the power transformer was shot, once I had what I needed to power it (Euro style power cable and step-up transformer), and fixed the major issues (being the red wire off the transformer terminal 9 going to terminal 20 instead of 19, and the power resistor that goes across the PTU one side wasn't soldered on), I did the resistance checks and they were all good, so I powered it on and the PTU started smoking. So luckily a second one was included, so I swapped that out, in the process I changed quite a few of the wires, mostly to clean up how it looks, re-touched all the solder joints, then I redid the resistance checks and they looked good, powered it up, no smoke, voltage checks were good, checked the audio and all was good!
For future reference if you are going to use a step-up or step-down transformer (I am in Canada (110V)and using a 220v Crack) I recommend going with a 200W transformer even thought the amp only draws about 40W. The first one I had was 100W and I'm not sure if it was a problem with the unit or not enough power, but I switched over to the 200W and it has been working well so far.
Going to leave it stock for a little while then install the speedball addon (already have it) so I can see what kind of difference I hear.
