In article , bitrex wrote:

A mechanical impact to the knob may be a common factor that damaged both channels of the pot.

I think we might have our suspect, here. I took a closer look at the
pots and I overlooked it initially. It's subtle but the metal housings
of both have some slight bending/warping that the other, more recessed
pots don't. Looks very much like impact damage to me.

I'll swap them out and see what happens.

I picked up a nice subwoofer system with integrated amp at a local
electronics flea-market last year, for about 15% of the original
price. The seller said "It works fine, but the volume adjustment knob
is missing." It wasn't just the knob - the whole potentiometer shaft
was snapped off, inside the mounting flange. Tried it when I got it
home, and the amp powered up but wouldn't play any music.

When I opened up the amp I found the dual pot bent backwards and
smashed up - both halves were open-circuit. Apparently somebody had
struck the pot knob quite hard, somehow, and completely wrecked it.

I removed it and tacked a couple of resistors into place to simulate a
mid-scale setting on each channel, and the amp came back to life and
the subwoofer worked. A $6 purchase from eBay, for a package of three
dual-section 20k linear pots of the right size, and another session of
soldering, and the subwoofer was as-good-as-new. Works beautifully,
alongside my heavily-refurbished (from-the-same-flea-market) Minimus
77 speakers and refurbished (also-from-the-same-flea-market) Proton
receiver and (made-almost-entirely-from-recycled-and-eBay-parts)
Raspberry Pi media streaming player.