Posting this as resolved…just FYI.
I lent a friend one of my RPi IQAudIO DAC Pro setups with BAL outputs…and the other day he called me up said its not working.
Went through some remote troubleshooting and looked like no LED’s on the RPi so we tried a different power socket and still nothing.
When I got there today it was quite warm to the touch and dead as a doornail. I tried another RPi on the power supply and that fired up so I feared the worst and swapped out the RPi with an Emotiva DC-1 DAC USB connected direct to the MacMini he is using for Roon Server. The old RPi was smelling a bit toasted…like the magic smoke had come out…hmmmm.
He was happy he had music again but complained it sounded worse (shrill) than the RPi IQAudIO DAC Pro setup…so I took the old dead RPi home and set about seeing what was salvageable. I wonder if the DC-1 will sound better on the RPi connection with the LAN connected in the middle than direct to the MacMini.
While sniffing around it looked a little brown around the SD card and sure enough that had shorted out and its all back running with a new SD card happy as a clam.