Hi-Fi Cock-ups. What's Your Biggest Disaster?

[Macca]

According to Alan Sugar's autobiography, the size of the cabinets was calculated to maximize shipping container space, nothing to do with acoustics!

Yes, I've read it. The parts that cover his time in audio are very interesting. He certainly doesn't sugar coat it (ho ho).

[GrahamS]

Yes, I've read it. The parts that cover his time in audio are very interesting. He certainly doesn't sugar coat it (ho ho).

It was dog eat dog and the devil took what was left..

[Primalsea]

Leant over my system one day with a woolly jumper on, just to reach something behind, pick up arm on my turntable linked into my jumper, and thus pulled the arm across the platter, in doing so' terminally bent the cantilever of the moving coil cartridge I had only recently fitted!

My wife done something similar to my Goldring 1042 which at the time was a very expensive purchas for me. One day I noticed a bit of yellow duster fluff hanging off the cantilever. Closer inspection revealed that it was hanging off to one side. The turntable was wonderfully free of dust however, something to be positive about at the time.

[Yomanze]

I let a digital cable attached to my luvverly Theta Gen V DAC dangle against the speaker posts of an on AVI Lab Series amp - 200wpc.
BANG and lots of smoke.
DAC was dead as a dodo.
Amp was fine, though.

Bought a Sony PS-X50 turntable on eBay, fully aware that it was 110V and I needed to connect the 240/110V converter that the seller also supplied.
When the box arrived I was so excited I forgot about the voltage thing and plugged the deck straight into the UK mains, leaving the converter undiscovered in the box.
Damn thing never worked again.

Oh dear, one of the finest DACs ever made.

[dowser]

My dad had a cat which had a habit of sleeping on top of his quite expensive Panasonic VCR.
This brute of a machine cost over 600 quid in the early 90s...a huge amount and even in standby was the warmest perch in his unmodernised terrace home.
It stayed in standby....and hence stayed warm when the moggy decided to piss its bed.

My dad said the smell, when he returned from work many hours later, was beyond description....and lingered in the house for days.

The insurance did not cover it.

I was a repair engineer early in my life - you’d be amazed how common this was. If you didn’t get power off quickly it’ll generally eat straight the PCB tracks and component legs. We had plastic gloves and a pack of servisol foam cleaner out the back of the workshop - generally the van drivers delivering faulty kit already knew which items were piss infected & dumped them by the door

[struth]

Had a kid piss in my tool case. Littlebastard.com

[Unomelodica]

Selling my trio L-07D, as and didnt really use the system , job ,young children ....fool me .

2ndly, again rather didnt need to sell but did marantz CD-7 , what was I thinking

G

[montesquieu]

Selling my trio L-07D, as and didnt really use the system , job ,young children ....fool me .

2ndly, again rather didnt need to sell but did marantz CD-7 , what was I thinking

G

My LP12 sat out the small children phase safely in its box. Luckily for me it probably trebled in value in that time. (Otherwise I'd never have afforded the Townshend Rock Reference that replaced it).

[Barry]

I'm confident that anything I've binned that was rubbish then is still rubbish now (thankfully)!

I've never really 'binned' anything: speakers, amplifiers, turntables, arms or cartridges. If there has been something I no longer had any use for, I have either sold them on, or given them away.

The only things I have discarded, but with the intention of using parts to build something better were: a Collaro 2020 turntable (a sort of "poor man's" Garrard 301), but I saved the (substantial) motor; and a pair of home-built Mullard 5-10 amplifiers, but I kept the Parmeko transformers.

[Dubster68]

Bought my first Ortofon 2m Black cart and spent over £500 and thought keeping the stylus guard on was the best option. Went to use removed the guard and found the cantilever bent due to wrongly fixing the guard in the first place . So thought easy to straighten, bugger snapped new stylus required