Yikes what a strange story, but we’ve been using the original NVIDIA Shield for years and suddenly, our home theater’s audio-video receiver (AVR) died. It literally wouldn’t power up and the UPS also didn’t work. Replacing the UPS didn’t help.
We also replaced the receiver and the Shield actually caused the processor to hard crash (as the original AVR did). It would just power off. The theory is that the HDMI input went out of spec and blew up the AVR. We should not have just kept using it.
I haven’t seen anything on the Internet on this topic, and we replaced the NVIDIA Shield with the a new NVIDIA Shield TV and it works fine. So be warned, if suddenly your equipment shuts down it could be a bad HDMI driver.
I‘ve heard of bad receivers, but never of source devices shorting them, so beware
