George- Unfortunately, it's possible/probable that some of what you have dealt with is caused by living on the bleeding edge. Sometimes, extracting that last bit of performance comes at the expense of some reliability. One of my engineering colleagues once told me that there are three variables in every project: cost, quality/performance, and schedule. When you specify two of them, they dictate the third. Although I have absolutely zero technical knowledge of circuitry and electrical engineering, of all of the supposed experts that have commented so far, I find Almarg's analysis to be persuasive. And that leaves aside the circumstantial evidence that the same part failed in the same unusual way, twice in a row. That, to me, strongly suggests some kind of unusual interaction among the component parts of the system.
Anyways, the retailer, distributors, and manufacturers involved all stepped up. You've been made whole. It's the very rare manufacturer of anything at all that provides warranty coverage for consequential damages. In my recollection, virtually every warranty I've ever taken the time to read expressly rules out such coverage. You're out some time to replace some circuit boards. If a fuse blows, do you expect someone to compensate you for the time it takes to replace it? The other option, I imagine, was for you to pay for shipping the speaker back to ML. I think you lucked out by having a manufacturer willing to take a chance that you would be able to make that swap yourself without doing other damage, which based on all of the available evidence, you would have then blamed on ML.
Anyways, the retailer, distributors, and manufacturers involved all stepped up. You've been made whole. It's the very rare manufacturer of anything at all that provides warranty coverage for consequential damages. In my recollection, virtually every warranty I've ever taken the time to read expressly rules out such coverage. You're out some time to replace some circuit boards. If a fuse blows, do you expect someone to compensate you for the time it takes to replace it? The other option, I imagine, was for you to pay for shipping the speaker back to ML. I think you lucked out by having a manufacturer willing to take a chance that you would be able to make that swap yourself without doing other damage, which based on all of the available evidence, you would have then blamed on ML.