Amps that have fried your speakers and other exciting adventures in hifi

[Tryant]

Now here's a cheery topic. How many of you have had the depressing experience of your amp suddenly taking out your woofers? Happened in a nanosecond with my wife's Musical Fidelity amp. Didn't realise there wasn't any protection in the circuit to prevent this happening. I think that's what used to be called the 'Purist' approach to amplifier design for better sound.

[Firebottle]

Was working on a little switch mode converter to power an in car amp, run from 12V, quite a small unit.

Thought I would give a quick test without bolting the switching transistor to its heatsink, big mistake.
The plastic bodied transistor heated up so quickly that there was an actual flame coming from it - oops.

[icehockeyboy]

Years ago I had a phenomenal American amp, it was a Phase Linear, 350 RMS per channel into 8 ohms, 450 into 4 ohms, it was feeding speakers that at the time were the only ones that could handle the power, Bose 901’s.

I had been away, leaving my set up in the hands of a friend, who had promised to take great care of it.

I think you can guess the outcome of this tale!

Upon my return, first thing I did was want to listen to my beloved Hifi , only to realise that one channel was completely dead!

Further inspection revealed that all 9 speakers in the Bose were fried, caused by the massively powerful amp going DC on one side!

Luckily AR Teledyne who were in charge of importing them at this time replaced it free of charge, as did Bose, with not just 9, but 18 brand new drivers, so a happy ending!


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[eisenach]

Musical Fidelity Electra 100.

Fried my Rogers LS6as. I was very cross. Managed to find a distressed cabinet pair on ebay and cobbled together one good set. Had the amplifier repaired. It happened again. By now LS6as had become fashionable and expensive. Oh, well ...

[Tryant]

Do I detect a sub-thread in this thread? I had one of those Electras too at some point some years ago. This was one of those X-thingies with the cool extruded cases that were popular back in the day. MF must have spent more on the case than the junk inside. It did however sound very good when it was working. Took out the woofers in a pair of P3ESR's.

[hifi_dave]

Exposure power-amp, Michell Alecto and AVI power-amp. All went poof without any warning. That's not many considering the thousands of amps I have had pass through my hands.

[Lawrence001]

I was selling an ESS power amp from the 70s , powerful thing with fuses before the speaker outs. Anyway, I was giving a demo of it and something happened, I forget what, might have been a thunderstorm, the fuse blew, and I didn't have any spares. He was a professional off road driver and offered to do a "field repair" which consisted of wrapping tin foil round the fuse and replacing it. Put the amp back on, one woofer immediately blown. The amp was fine, I think it was the residual charge in the huge caps that did it. Cost me about £100 to get a used replacement woofer from the States, I was actually lucky there were any available globally and he did buy the amp despite the problem.

Sent from my BLN-L21 using Tapatalk

[spendorman]

In 1976, bought a new Quad 405, immediately blew a KEF B200 in my home-made Collom's Mini Monitors. !00 Watts was just too much!

Had both B200's rebuilt by KEF.

[Sherwood]

who's going to tempt fate and say it's never happened to them?

[montesquieu]

who's going to tempt fate and say it's never happened to them?

Not me.

Fried a Tannoy 15in Monitor Gold when a Krell SA50 went DC on me in the left channel ... first thing I knew about it was the smell of burning paper, then I saw the cone begin to char from the centre by the voice coil, travelling outwards like the map in the credits of Bonanza.

They had to be re-coned as a pair, £600+ to Lockwoods thank you very much. Got about half back from the house insurance.

Took a good six months to sound the same too as the thick bindings on new MG cones take a bit of loosening up.