Worst audio screw-up - what have you broken?

[GabeG]

Inspired by the ruined tonearm thread.

My worst mishap: I was young and was "adjusting" the top screw on my alphason mcs tone-arm because I thought the bearing was sticky. I adjusted it so well that the housing became dislodged and I found myself watching countless ball bearings bouncing all over the place.

Nothing else before or after has come anywhere near that incident.

[motorcitydave]

I blew up an amplifier before...a mark levinson no. 23. :laugh:

[nosticker]

Worst overall: feeding back my speakers with some ultra-high frequency noise. I blew 16 piezos. Hard to feel intelligent after that.



Dan

[Wardsweb]

I was resoldering a lead inside my Benz Micro wood body. I finished the job with the aid of a Leica microscope. When I pulled the soldering iron away, the attraction to the magnet flipped the cartridge and it now needs retipping. I presently run a Glider, so I'm not without tunes.

http://www.wardsweb.org/misc/leica.jpg

[drbryant]

My 4-year old pushed in the tweeter of one of my B&W CDM9's. I'm sure that this has happened to countless others. Those tweeters were designed to be pushed in by curious children.

[longjohn]

An RCA cable was stuck in its plug in the back of my Yamaha four-track cassette recording deck. I pulled on it really hard to get it to come off (I was relocating the deck and had to disconnect it all) and it came off alright, with part of the connector with it. Ouch. It was the left monitor out channel, so now I have to monitor via headphones, or the stereo out jacks - I still haven't got it fixed.

[DaveN]

I use the same set of mains with two different sets of amplification. My tube amp is used for 2-ch music and my monster Rotel amps are used for movies. To facilitate this, I have two sets of speaker cables (biwire) that I swap at the speakers. (This has a remarkably low WAF!)

Anyway I had the tube amp hooked up to the speakers but I needed to do something with the rest of the system.....so I powered it on. The Rotel 1090 fired up right away and I heard a crackle and a pop and then there was a fairly pungent smoke like burning walnuts. The protection lights came on - briefly, and then all was dark with the amp. It only took a moment to see that the banana plugs on the speaker cables were touching each other - thus creating an effective impedance of zero hhms. There may be some amps out there with the muscle to drive low impedance loads - but not this low.

I had to pay nearly $300 to have the left channel rebuilt. Really stupid. It is now my current practice to unplug the unused amp so that this never happens again.

[pdenny]

Not a big tragedy compared to other stories, but I bought a vintage RCA CD player from Prix (Audio) and cut right through the power cable as I was opening the box (a little too frantically) with a pair of scissors.

[Doug Sclar]

I guess I haven't really broken anything that I couldn't fix.

Kind of funny, but I used to work on huge recording studios and particularly the consoles. Folks used to ask me if I was afraid of damaging such expensive equipment. I guess a console looks pretty complicated and expensive, but it's not really. Sure the whole thing is expensive, but generally if anything was going to break, it would just be a small part of a single module. I guess I've broken a lot of things trying to fix things, but that's kind of par for the course.

A good example was the old Ampex MM 1100 multitrack. They used a lot of point to point wiring with molex connectors, and it was a trick to take a bay apart, service the problem, put the bay back in, and not have something new fail. Usually it was a bad connection with one of the Molex connectors. I hated those things. :mad: Often it was just a bad fit with the mating connectors, but sometimes there would be broken wires due to the poor strain relief in those harnesses. Of course the wires were tight, so it was really hard to fix those types of issues. The MM-1200 was a huge improvement as far as ease of servicing was concerned. :righton:

One thing I did learn. Always use a high impedance or capacitively coupled probe when nosing around in circuitry. Just looking at a signal in a circuit can damage the circuit if your probe diverts current from it's normal paths.

[Duggeh]

Audiowise, nothing I can remember thats of note. But I did feed jammy toast slices to the Betamax when I was little, ruining it just a tad. My parents rented their TV and video back then so they swapped it for a VHS deck.

[Gary Freed]

I had purchased a AIWA Cassette Deck in 1977. It was working great until about 2004, when the serpentine of rubber bands throughout started to fail. I tried to install new ones, but for the life of me there were just too many twists and turns and cogs and pulleys. It's amazing how they build those things to begin with.

[DaleH]

I was resoldering a lead inside my Benz Micro wood body. I finished the job with the aid of a Leica microscope. When I pulled the soldering iron away, the attraction to the magnet flipped the cartridge and it now needs retipping. I presently run a Glider, so I'm not without tunes.

[/IMG]

Nice microscope.:righton:

I did something similar. I was getting ready to have some fun with my Lyra Clavis. The stylus was glued on crooked by about 6 degrees and I was going to attempt the impossible, re-glue it. So I'm all ready to start, got my stereozoom 7 all set up, remove the stylus guard and it slips knocking the whole cantilever off. Ruined all my fun.:(

[DaWoofer]

I have several amps and receivers and speakers all at one location. Well, this tends to leave many speaker wires about. One day I was switching amps and speakers and hooked one amp's speaker wires into the receivers speaker connections. When I powered the system on I heard a loud squeal and that burnt electronics smell right away. Funny thing is the receiver was not powered up and its the on that got its output board fried and the amp doing the powering survived. O.K, I'm a dummy.

[LeeS]

I was resoldering a lead inside my Benz Micro wood body. I finished the job with the aid of a Leica microscope. When I pulled the soldering iron away, the attraction to the magnet flipped the cartridge and it now needs retipping. I presently run a Glider, so I'm not without tunes.

http://www.wardsweb.org/misc/leica.jpg

Wow, serious microscope.

[SkyBlueShag]

*I put a 2A3C tube in the wrong way on my SET. Got a little worried when i saw smoke. Fortunately, the resistor damage seemed to be only superficial. The distributor corroborated this and said he'd repair it under warranty if it stopped working. The unit has since worked flawlessly.

*I thought the spade connectors to my MIT cables were screw on. Oops. I broke a soft cable by twisting it. Does anyone know if there's a special technique to repairing this?

[Glen B]

Nothing broken in 40 years in the hobby.

[Doug Sclar]

OK, I thought and thought about it and finally came up with a good one. About 10 years ago I decided to use the speakers in my 50" RPTV as a center channel speaker network. I took the front cover and found what I figured would ba a good place to access those speakers so I could hook them up to the center amplifier.

For some unknown reason, I totally screwed up and hooked the new amp up to the output of the TV's internal amp instead of the internal speakers. Of course this totally cooked the TV's internal amp. :mad:

I thought about fixing the amp for a while, until I realized that I didn't really need it as I rarely llistened to the TV without the external sound system. I ultimately replaced that TV with a HDTV, and still have it. The only thing wrong with it is that it has no sound. :D Of course I could always get a cheap amp to solve that problem.

[-=Rudy=-]

I've snapped off a few Shure V15 Type V cantilevers over the years. One was just a month or two after I bought it, which is how I learned how brittle it was. Fortunately Lyle Cartridges stocked plenty of replacements, and loved my return business. :D

I once shorted the leads of my Carver M400 "cube" amp. Within warranty. :whistle: So, it was covered. I heard two things from the store I bought it from: 1) some of the transistors had nothing left except the wire leads sticking out of the circuit board; 2) please don't ever bring this amp back in for service again. :laugh:

While I didn't personally break it, my one Sony reel deck, up on a high shelf, had the screw holding the spring-loaded hub work loose, and it dumped a reel of Maxell UD35-90 on top of my head. :mad:

[Marvin]

I was trying to adjust the speed on my turntable, for some reason using the screws that you access thru holes at the bottom of the turntable rather than the sliding switch on top. I don't know exactly what I did, but somehow I reversed the 33 and 45 settings, so now I have to select 45 to play an LP.

It works that way, so I suppose it's not really broken.

Oh, and then there was another time I was trying to clean a CD laser lens by blowing compressed air into the unit. The straw came out of the blower and got lost in the CD player. I was already having problems with the player, so I don't know if this made a difference.

[imagnrywar]

B&W tweeter got pushed in, don't ask me what i was thinking but i tried to suck it back out with a vacuum cleaner... bad move. really bad. :realmad:

[Sput]

The one that stands out the most, the one that irriated me to no end and still does....

After many dollars spent and many days spent trying to put on new surrounds in prefect fashion on a great pair of midranges............................... ...................I poked a hole through one with my screwdriver while reinstalling them in the cabinet.

[-=Rudy=-]

I was trying to adjust the speed on my turntable, for some reason using the screws that you access thru holes at the bottom of the turntable rather than the sliding switch on top. I don't know exactly what I did, but somehow I reversed the 33 and 45 settings, so now I have to select 45 to play an LP.

I'm guessing you over-adjusted both screws in the wrong direction and inadvertently switched the speeds that way. :agree: In fact, it's that same speed control circuitry I once modified to convert my older direct drive 'table for 78RPM use.

[rockclassics]

For some unknown reason, I totally screwed up and hooked the new amp up to the output of the TV's internal amp instead of the internal speakers. Of course this totally cooked the TV's internal amp. :mad:

I thought about fixing the amp for a while, until I realized that I didn't really need it as I rarely llistened to the TV without the external sound system. I ultimately replaced that TV with a HDTV, and still have it. The only thing wrong with it is that it has no sound. :D Of course I could always get a cheap amp to solve that problem.

I don't feel so bad now. I did this same thing several years ago with one of my TVs. I really felt like a dumb *** for doing it too.

[Ski Bum]

When my younger daughter was two or three years old, she wanted to do everything that her daddy did. Unfortunately, this included using the turntable. She dragged the tonearm across the rubber turntable mat when no one else was around. I was never able to even find the stylus, much less fix it.

[LesPaul666]

Broke the cantilever off of My Benz Glider....TWICE.