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

Oh, I have a few:

(1) A few years ago I received my Line Magnetic DAC with an upgraded Burson V5 opamp loose inside the cabinet. I found out where it was supposed to sit, installed it and powered it up. After a very short while the red plastic surround of the opamp started to melt and there was an ominous smell. Luckily I had neither attached it to the stereo nor popped the lid back on so I watched this at close hand and turned it off almost immediately. After a cooling off period, I placed the opamp in the correct direction, switched it on and ... there was music ... so no harm seems to have been done. I felt like a lucky bastard! It is still inside the DAC today.

(2) I took off the cantilever of my then Benz Micro Gullwing SLR while removing one last speck of dust below the tonearm. I had taken extreme care while dusting the turntable off but then I noticed I had missed a small spot of dust and moved too quickly and ... disaster struck. Luckily my insurance covered 80% of the cost of a rebuild. Once more a lucky bastard! There's a thread on PFM somewhere that documents the slight mishap.
 
Used small Perreaux Silhouette mono amps drivning large forsemann speakers. Had to much to drink and then played All night at high volume. Now they can drive most but that was to much and I blew them up. But they worked again at a cost.
 
Accidentally plugging my DAC into the tape out instead of the line in of my pre. Full volume on all switches, jumped out of my skin, took me a few seconds of switching and trying to turn down to realise what was going on & powered down with an almighty thump. I got lucky, no damage caused, but man, that could have easily been worse...

I did also have an 'interesting' early DIY bodge experience with a CD player, where I thought I'd just put it all back together, lucky I did, because I'd put the main PSU caps the wrong way around, and they immediately exploded inside the case when I powered the unit up. I was much, much more careful after that and counted my blessings that I hadn't left the lid off...
 
Worked for the local Marantz dealer -saved up and ordered a 33(or was it a 3300?) pre-amp and 250 power amp on salesman accession deal (50% of retail) -since this was less than dealer cost -all dealer orders had to be fullfilled before they shipped accession orders. Took a LONG time - but finally my two boxes arrive at my store -unpack -hook up to a AR -XA turntable and AR LST speakers -throw hendrix on the TT- made it maybe 30 seconds or a single min. into Jimi's work and a really impressive electrical fire starts in the amp-big sparks n flames - powered down and that was it. Warranty repair also took forever and while waiting for the repair a customer offered a shoot out between his early Audio Research preamp and anything I had in the store - his ARC left every other pre-amp in the store that day in it's dust. I still pay attention to specs/design - but until I've heard something -don't have a opinion about SQ. But those big blue meters on the 250 were attractive.
 
Two to report:

1) Saved up a lot of (at the time) very hard earned pennies and bought my first ever LP12/Ittok/Asak in around 1983. Was living in a rented room in a HMO and had it set up in my bedroom with a 42/110 underneath it on the essential Sound Organisation table and Kans. Now the HMO was a house only in name,it was one step removed from a demolition site in some ways and the wardrobe in said bedroom was on its last legs. Anyway rushing to get out of the door to work I shut the wardrobe door and left the room only to hear a loud crash, returned to the room to see a mangled LP12 underneath a collapsed wardrobe. Fortunately the insurance paid out and even more fortunately the Naim 42/110 were completely unscathed despite the Sound Org table bending under the destruction.

2) Not long after said incident with LP12 I bought a Denon cassette deck secondhand and it never sounded quite right. My mate who was studying electronics bought some test equipment round and worked out the azimuth was off so adjusted the heads using said equipment to align them perfectly. In the absence of the proper stuff he suggested I put a tiny dab of superglue on the head adjuster to stop it drifting over time. I retrieved my half used tube of superglue and carefully aligned the nozzle with the head adjustment screw and squeezed gently, but nothing came out... so squeezed a bit harder and harder still and then the entire contents of the tube emptied itself into the mechnaism. Within 10 minutes the machine was inoperable.... ah well back then I was young and stupid.... as opposed to just stupid :D
 
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!

How did you put 2a3's in wrong? Shouldn't really be possible or so I thought?
 
How did you put 2a3's in wrong? Shouldn't really be possible or so I thought?

There are 4 equally spaced pins: 2 wider ones onthe front, and 2 narrower ones to the rear. The problem was that the valve seat allows you to slot them in any way without restriction, so whilst I did have a look at the bottom of the valve, all the pins looked similar enough for me to think the valve goes in any way. Which was 'confirmed' when I started to put them in to the amp - incorrectly - with very little resistance. Certainly no more than you usually get with a valve...

It wasn't until after I realised I knackered the thing did I look a lot more closely. Now, if the pins were spaced more irregularly like most valves do, I'd have been fine! Oh well. Lesson learnt.
 
There are 4 equally spaced pins: 2 wider ones onthe front, and 2 narrower ones to the rear. The problem was that the valve seat allows you to slot them in any way without restriction, so whilst I did have a look at the bottom of the valve, all the pins looked similar enough for me to think the valve goes in any way. Which was 'confirmed' when I started to put them in to the amp - incorrectly - with very little resistance. Certainly no more than you usually get with a valve...

It wasn't until after I realised I knackered the thing did I look a lot more closely. Now, if the pins were spaced more irregularly like most valves do, I'd have been fine! Oh well. Lesson learnt.

Lesson indeed, sorry to hear that, I'm always very careful when fitting 2a3's in my puresound amp.
 
Wrote off an Ortofon Kontrapunkt C whilst wearing a loose armed Jersey, doh! The upside was that while cogitating over it’s replacement I bought an AT 150SA MM, I was struck by how good it was and left it in - saving me around £1K.
 
Wrote off an Ortofon Kontrapunkt C whilst wearing a loose armed Jersey, doh! The upside was that while cogitating over it’s replacement I bought an AT 150SA MM, I was struck by how good it was and left it in - saving me around £1K.

Ah, the jersey / woolly jumper, THE biggest enemy of any turntable rig.
 
Ah, the jersey / woolly jumper, THE biggest enemy of any turntable rig.

Yep, my first MC a Dynavector Karat 23r with the ruby cantilever ended this way, my own fault, reaching across to the platter I caught the cantilever on the sleeve of a woolly pullover, the tonearm was locked in place, it must have snagged and broke off. I didn't know it had happened at the time and only realised when I went to play a record, luckily I had a Chorus Black as an option and the Dynavector was exchanged by a new Diamond cantilevered Karat model by Pear Audio.

That's my one and only right off by me, when my son was three he lifted the Hadcock tonearm off its pivot, he thought it was a light sabre, dropped it on the floor and broke the cantilever off a WB Ply MC. Insurance covered that one but I also moved the TT out of reach of little hands.
 
Had a Pioneer Amplifier in the ˋ90s.
Gave it for an upgrade to someone (forgotten, who it was).
Got the advice to solder some copper bridges by myself.
End of it: The Amplifier didn‘t worked after this adventure.
Spend a lot of money to keep it working again.
But it was also the end of „solder by myself“.
 
My daughter bent the cantilever on my troika. Claimed on insurance and they paid out the cost of the equivalent top of the range Linn cartridge at the time, can’t remember which one but I bought a new pair of PMS Ob1’s with the pay out. They paid the dealer direct so I couldn’t get the cash.
 
Great Stuff chaps,

As an observation leading by a long way are the fully destroyed LP12's although LInnformaniac83's Linn Akiva and Rosewinds Benz Micro Gullwing are also horrific.AS was the Karma and Troika...

Chuckled about the Denon cassette deck mechanism Tiggers the superglue must have been the worst material to get in there.
 
Great Stuff chaps,

As an observation leading by a long way are the fully destroyed LP12's although LInnformaniac83's Linn Akiva and Rosewinds Benz Micro Gullwing are also horrific.AS was the Karma and Troika...

Chuckled about the Denon cassette deck mechanism Tiggers the superglue must have been the worst material to get in there.
It was one of those moments where you can't believe it's just happened and you keep going back and checking... like when you have a bump/get bumped in an expensive car, you wake up in the night and go and check to see if it was just a bad dream, I felt sick. Luckily it only cost me my insurance excess.

PS, I don't know why I forgot this one, but my nephew mangled the cantilever on my Rega Apheta last year too. I didn't claim for that one, I paid £350 for it second hand, and sold it to someone else for about £150 who had it rebuilt.
 
The cleaner managed to dismantle my Sumoko Pearwood Celebration 11 Catridge with years still left in it. I had a replacement stored away as prices only rise. If I was to buy one today it's over 2 grand which I could not afford now.
 


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