Speaker pHAT turned quiet

I’m hoping for some help here. I purchased the speaker pHAT to add to a Pi Zero W last Saturday, I soldered the speaker and connected it up on Wednesday. I installed MusicBox on to the Pi Zero and tested it all out. The sound leave was quiet but acceptable, once I’d found the right settings on MusicBox. I ran it again today and pushed the volume from 85% to 100% which indeed produced a louder sound. I paused the music whilst doing something and forgot I’d left the system on for quite a while. When I realised the whole system was rather hot. Having left it to cool I then checked the playback, but it was now too quiet to hear much and certainly about half as loud as it was. I have taken a good look at the soldering of the wire from the speaker to the board and the connections still look good. For the headers I used the pimoroni hammer headers (that was nice and easy) so no solder issues there.

Any other thoughts on what has happened, or did I overheat the whole system and something has broken?

same thing happened to me… actually very frustrating…i think it burned up…

i posted several videos of them here

right now only the leds are working

There was an issue with the pHat Beat, where it would put a DC voltage on the speakers, when paused. And if paused for a long time the speakers would get hot. As far as I know that’s been fixed in the current installer. I would think they rolled that fix into the Speaker pHat software too? I would hope anyway. They both use the same DAC, the pHat Beat just uses two to get stereo.

Solution may not have been rolled into Music Box of course.

To be honest I don’t have the knowledge to know exactly what happens. I just remember seeing similar posts dealing with VLC Radio (Pirate Radio) on the pHat Beat. And once they became awar it was happing, they rolled a fix in to the installer. I’m not sure if its rolled in the pHat Beat part or the Pirate Radio part of the installer. @gadgetoid likely knows the ins and outs, I think he’s the one that patched it.