The Spark Between

Sad day. Electronics from freshman year of college have finally given up the ghost… the Creative DDTS-100 was a pretty awesome little device:

It was essentially a multiplexer / digital multichannel decoder for powered speakers, such as what you would buy for a PC. Think mini-receiver with no amplifiers.  Nate & I used it in the dorms extensively to drive my Klipsch ProMedia 5.1′s, but it seems in the 2 years of transportation and storage since, the forces that be took it out on my poor DDTS-100:

For the non-techies: Broken circuit boards are bad.  Quite bad.

For the techies: Apparently (based on the smell and general not-working-ness) this connected a couple hot traces to a ground plane, shorted the power circuits, and fried the heck out of a bunch of stuff :-/
Rest in peace.