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Your worst ever equipment mishaps...Real right offs !

Miss Ariel

pfm Member
Anyone here had a piece of kit that they have been careless and damaged it beyond repair.Real expensive ones....cartridges - Speakers - anything ?

Looking back mine was in 1985.Just brought a Sony Walkman Pro from the Cornflake Shop in London and on the train back home couldn't resist putting a mix tape in and got it into it's carry case.New batteries installed.Sounded wicked.Getting off the train 45 mins later I had forgot to push a locking stud in the carry case....the Walkman Pro hit the stone platform.....Badly dented.Getting back indoors it did work but cocktail sticks where needed to hold it together....A right Fuc# Up of the highest order.

A couple of months later I had saved up for another.Still have it BTW.
 
LP12/Aro/Lingo all on phase 7 or whatever Mana wall shelf. Bolted pretty securely into the brick wall. Or so I thought. One day, I came back to find my impressive vertical assembly in a haphazard horizontal arrangement all over the floor, including one written off LP12...... the one and only time I ever had to claim on insurance for a bit of hifi.... in hindsight I should have used stronger wall bolts but I suspect one of the bolts must have been either in crumbly brick or the mortar between bricks, and something persuaded the lot to make its bid for freedom that one day.......
 
A resistor went short on my Sugden A48 mkII, some capacitors then literally exploded, liquid and small pieces of paper all over the place inside the amplifier, board almost distorted because of the heat.
My 14 year old daughter witnessed the whole process and could not do anything as we are French speaking persons and she didn’t know that mains means power switch on this amp so she just let it burn until it stopped.
The whole house was smelling very bad for almost a week but as the unit is completely closed, no damage was done on the surrounding furniture.
This was a good sounding equipment for me at that time so it went to the repair shop........at a cost !:eek:
 
I blew up my first Linn Majik, I’d bought it ex dem a few months earlier. A friend had wanted to hear some speakers he’d just bought on my Linn electronics. I switched the amp off whilst swapping the cables from my speakers to his and all was well... I forgot to switch the amp off when swapping the leads back and they touched, smoke quickly ensued. Luckily Linn were really good about it and essentially sent me a new amp for the fixed £150 service charge. I’d asked them to replace a couple of cosmetically marked panels and bill me for them whilst it was there. What I got back was my original base plate and transformer with every other part replaced, also whilst my original Majik was a line level model, I got a phono stage equipped model back, no extra charge. I’d essentially paid the price difference between the line level version and the phono version for all that, so I was very, very pleased.

A few years later, I snapped the cantilever off a Linn Akiva whilst drunk, clattered the remote off the tonearm dancing around like a prat.

There have been a couple of other instances of damage including a shorted Linn Klout, but that was a Telewest engineer, pulled the cables from the back of my Keltiks whilst I was at work. The missus had been listening to music and had left the system on. Telewest paid for the damage. My mate’s kids crushed the ceramic tweeters on my Keltiks, I replaced them with Ninka tweeters which sounded better. My missus also melted the lid of my LP12 with her straighteners... and two carpets... and the top of a Loewe TV.‍:mad:
 
LP12/Aro/Lingo all on phase 7 or whatever Mana wall shelf. Bolted pretty securely into the brick wall. Or so I thought. One day, I came back to find my impressive vertical assembly in a haphazard horizontal arrangement all over the floor, including one written off LP12...... the one and only time I ever had to claim on insurance for a bit of hifi.... in hindsight I should have used stronger wall bolts but I suspect one of the bolts must have been either in crumbly brick or the mortar between bricks, and something persuaded the lot to make its bid for freedom that one day.......
Bath curve of failure.
 
:eek:The thought of owning a turntable fills me with dread. There lovely to look at and listen to but I'm extremely wary of getting too close . The thought of having to change a cart on one :oops: no chance.
 
Fortunately not beyond repair. I had a good drink one night, dropped the clamp inside my CD3, tried to poke it out but that didn’t work, started playing records and drank some more, tried to unbolt the case but couldn’t, had another drink, tried to shake it out, and you can imagine the rest. This sent me to Avondale and Les recommended pink fish media. And that is..

a) why I joined this forum, and
b) why I stay out of the DIY room!
 
In the early 90’s I read about this amazing tweak where you damped the inside of your CD player using blutak. I liberally applied it all over the insides of the case and stuffed it into the voids in the plastic mouldings in the transport mech as advised. My Marantz CD52SE never worked again.
 
How long have we got... Home built class A power amp went awry (I sorted PSU to input with screwdriver) and burned out the output relay system of my Naim NAC42 Naim repaired it FOC except postage with a hand written note saying that the JLH class A power amp was one of their favourites but they would recommend using a Naim preamp with a Naim power amp!
Drunken cantilever incident, but only a DL103, so not a total disaster.
The Canal Valve amp that put 400v DC through my thumb.
The two, truly awful, Heathkit germanium transistor amps that went DC and killed my Marsden Hall speakers.
The Akai cassette deck I rebuilt into a new chassis to fit my rack, which then sounded awful and I binned it.
The Amstrad amp I modified, got sounding really quite good then gave away one night after a student party to give me an excuse to buy a new amp I coveted and used for maybe a year before admitting it sounded crap.

I'm 60, and if I had learned from my hifi mistakes I'd be a genius.
 
Shorted out an Inca Tech Claymore 2. The fool I took it to in Enfield couldn't fix it and held on to it for the triage charge.

Also trashed my rondo bronze at a drunk reggae party.
 
If car audio can be part of it, listen to this : we were working on a many many watts car audio system my friend and I and all of a sudden, the small flat screw driver fell of the pocket of his shirt............directly on a huge Malory 1 farad capacitor that was full charge ! The spark was HUGE and the sound awful and the screw driver melted on the top of the capacitor!
Lesson learned that time.........when we were 17 ! :eek:
 
I haven't had many such misfortunes; touch wood. The only write-off I've suffered was a parallel tracking TT (Pioneer PL-L1000A) that was shipped without its original packaging materials or transit bolts in place. It arrived literally in pieces.
 
i stacked 2 pairs of ditton 44's and blew my amp up lol,thankfully it was repairable lol.
20150802-121559-zpscy4dqlx6.jpg
 
A Sumo Polaris Which was a standard power dual mono amp with a single PSU, before i made it into a dual mono amp with 2 PSU's... Worked for about 2 weeks before the output transistors fried and the whole thing remained in its box at my Folks house. That was 25/30 years ago. it remained there in my old room till only a few years ago. It did sound amazing for those 2 weeks though....
 
I have never had any self inflicted disasters with kit but I have seriously scratched some favourite albums with the Linn K18 stylus. The cause of this was serious drinking while playing records. I eventually worked out that playing vinyl and drinking don’t mix, so now at a certain stage I move to CDs only.

The K18 appeared very robust. I changed to an Ortofon MC, which makes me even more cautious.
 
On my 3rd Sb touch after hearing sizzling then a burning smell after inserting the wrong power lead connection.
 
Mine own mishap was very recent: I bought a New Audio Frontiers 2a3 Integrated just two weeks ago from this very site, and on taking delivery, quickly set it up and turned it on. Burning smell, then nothing. Not a sound. Took out the valves and realised I'd put in the 2a3s incorrectly which had likely burnt out the resistors and possibly has done more damage. I
Didn't even get to listen to the bloody thing before it's got to go straight back off to be fixed. So there's another couple of hundred quid at least gone. What a f***** moron I am!
 


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