Here are some tear­down instructions/destructions for open­ing up Digidesign’s Mbox 2. This lit­tle jour­ney took place after the USB port decided it would be a great time to fail, thus ren­der­ing the entire device use­less. Got to love it when a $2 part breaks a $500 device, huh?

Pre­sented with a choice of ship­ping it off for at least 2 weeks and some probably-not-insignificant freight costs (the device in ques­tion was under war­ranty but a par­al­lel import from the US), the best option was, of course, to crack the thing open.

YouTube evi­dence of the (highly suc­cess­ful) insan­ity follows:

I’ve been using it reli­ably for about a week now and can say con­fi­dently that no dam­age was done! In fact, it’s actu­ally sound­ing bet­ter, too.

Not only did the USB port com­ing loose stop data from flow­ing, it also caused ground­ing issues and intro­duced some hum/other noise when it was incor­rectly posi­tioned. The new USB port has not only stopped the device from spon­ta­neously dis­con­nect­ing, it’s also improved the qual­ity of the audio recorded. Brilliant.

Tags: 2, audio, avid, digidesign, disassembly, electronics, how-to, howto, instruction, mbox, Mbox2, open, repair, teardown