What if someone has an a problem with their Topping amp? Like the poor guy on forum.hifiguides.com with 93 posts trying to help him determine why his XLR input died. If he opens it, he suddenly now has a two broken parts with his Topping because he destroyed the solder connection of the potentiometer to the board by removing the knob.
This has been addressed as a problem the Topping Rep himself:
“The removal process could have degraded the pot further(I’m very certain it has, and again with reinstalling). (Also the pot is fully customized, you almost are not able to find exact replacement for the pot, 5k 4gang 5% -60db tracking) So this is not recommended for everyone else. Also as I posted earlier it’s clearly described and explained. It is the pot itself. But it’s caused by external forced applied to the pot during the knob installation process. Some ended up requiring less force some with more. So the end result is some units may exhibit this behavior. But like many others have said, it’s acceptable and doesn’t affect the performance itself of the volume control.”
Topping continues this practice, making their amps disposable. When trying to diagnose the problems you break the amplifier more. This is one example of the Topping quality problems.