Well, you’re not supposed to take the grilles off at all. So no, there is no ‘the moment you take off the grilles you’re supposed to.’ That’s why they’re there in the first place.
I only took it off to get a closeup view and maybe a few pics. My boneheaded accident happened within 10 seconds of removing the grille. Unfortunately, my curious nature burned me in this instance.
I definitely learned my lesson though. The grilles will stay on these drivers, period. Besides, they don’t hurt anything by being there! They are transparent to the sound, so I’ll take the protection of them being there any day!
Oh well, at least it wasn’t for nothing. If the driver wasn’t damaged, I wouldn’t have been able to verify they were genuine drivers. So at least something good came out of it.
Have you gotten any shell to try out the drivers yet? Also I recommend using BaoPals to look at stuff from TaoBao and BaoPals also gets results from Tmalls at the same time. You can look up whatever on BaoPals and it will fetch results from both TaoBao and Tmall.
Also I have updated my BaoPals collection here with some drivers, finally! https://www.baopals.com/discover/therealestlad/collections/fine-additions-to-my-collection