Is this fact or speculation? A "loose" part is easily found in visual inspection.
As someone who has spent my career in quality engineering in manufacturing environments, I can state that it is generally accepted that inspection is rarely more than 85% effective at catching flaws.
This is why we have the phrase "you can't inspect quality in" and you need processes and procedures to design it in, both in product design and in the manufacturing process, to use statistics to validate your key process variables in your initial runs and then monitor your subsequent runs using statistical process control to make sure they don't drift away from their nominals.
I'm not a pick and place or wave solder expert, so I don't know what type of process validation is typical for these types of operations, but yes, it is very common for vendor process faults to ship out their door and arrive at the customers door (the final assembly location) with issues. You try to inspect for these things as they come in the door, but remember, inspection is rarely more than 85% effective at catching issues, so usually the faults are only first discovered when you go to assemble and test the damned things.
Sometimes - again - since inspection is only 85% effective, you don't catch the issue on the first several of a new lot of products. Many may slip through and wind up in active inventory, ready to go out the door until you discover the issue on a product in production and then realize "holy ****, this impacts everything we made from the last lot" and you have to suddenly and quickly stop product that was about to go out the door, and sometimes even call stuff back that already shipped,
If you have an existing product and do your planning right, so you are building your next run well before you actually drop dead need it, you have the time to stop the line, and work with the vendor to fix the problem without running out of inventory and going into back order.
Unfortunately when something like this happens near a product launch, you don't have any existing inventory to run down, so you are immediately going to start impacting shipping product, especially since it's a new budget product, so right off the bat it's going to have higher demand than previous products because it is cheaper, and also happening as it is, right in the holiday rush.
Chances are keeping up with demand on a new product like this during the holiday rush would have been difficult to begin with, but a vendor production issue makes that even more challenging.
Being a small company more than likely makes this more difficult than if they were a huge corporation, but even so, huge corporations have delays and vendor issues like this all the time. It's really just a matter of fact of manufacturing, unfortunately.
People who don't understand manufacturing love to complain when issues happen, but the truth is, manufacturing is very complex and fraught with complications and errors, and even in the best large world-class corporations with armies of optimizing quality engineers doing statistical validations on processes, things often will and do go wrong.
Its one of the big problems with working in manufacturing. You don't get noticed and encouraged when everything is going right, regardless of how unlikely it is for everything to go right for long stretches of time. You only get noticed when something goes wrong, and it's only a matter of time until something goes wrong, even at the best manufacturers.
All this being said, I trust the Schiit guys to do the right thing,and fix it. It may result in a bit of a delay, but they will make it right. They have been very good to deal with every time I have done so (even when the issue I was dealing with them about was entirely my fault, I've actually never had an issue with them that was their fault)
