What is the most expensive mistake you have made?

This is not down to kit you have bought that is crap...its kit that WAS good before you got invlolved.

I have two contenders.
Firstly was i wired speaker outs on a Rotel intergrated amp into my Rotel power amp.

The sound was unbelievable! my kit sounded like gear ten times the price- for twenty seconds.

Then I noticed heat lines pouring out of the preamp! I could feel heat off it about 5m away.

Went to turn of the power from the front. When I touched the button it electrcuted me and blew up. painful way to irreperably damage £200 worth of amplifier.

Of cousre the simplest mistake i made was melting the voice coils on a pair of Willison Benesch ACTII speakers...that wern't mine.

For damaging the ACTIIs you have to realise i had an expendable income of ~ £20 a week. Guess how long it took me to pay off the £7k speakers

 

In 1993, after disconnecting the speaker cables, I forgot to turn the power off from my Creek 4040 amp. The bare speaker cable ends shorted, blew both channels. I managed to find some equilvalent output transistors to fix it, but since I didn't know I had to re-adjust the bias, the heatsink was very warm, although the sound was lush and full! That cost me less than 10 pounds to repair.

In another occassion, I bought a vintage Pye HF25 mono power amp without seeing it by mail order from a dodgy hi fi seller. The amp was completely bodged up, so I had to re-wire the whole amp to make it work. It took me about a week during the evenings to re-wire it, but it worked the first time I plugged some KT66 valves in. I paid 200 pounds for the damn thing! It could have been an expensive mistake if the power or the output transformers were dead.

Regards
Hon

 

Welcome mate, It sounds like you are ideal for this place!

I'll try to remember mine. I've got a nasty feeling that the brain chooses to forget my horrors. I have many bits of kit that were working [like an A400 amp] but are now in pieces because I never finished things I was doing. We have a habit of buying houses that need work, before I can get on with electronics. I once had a big power supply cap blow about 0.5m from my head, but it was faulty kit anyway.

 

It has something to do with speaker terminals and a NAD S300. :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry:

 

2 spring to mind really, the DCS Elgar & the Harmonix Reimyo cdp, both way in the relms of hifi, and zip all music.Also the dac 64 proving that hype can work, Dark days at Wm's on those occasions

 

Breaking the cantilever off an AT-OC7(£250) two days after fitting it.

Listen to CD's if you're pissed

Paul.

 

£250 was the cost of repair for when I snapped the cantilever off of my VDH Frog cart due to carless (mis-)handling of the tonearm. I was expecting the repair bill to be much worse, but after a 3 week wait said cart arrived back from VDH HQ as far as I was concerned as good as new (serviced and attended to by the main man himself).

Luckily I've not had any misfortunes with amps and shorting speaker cables yet, as all the amps I've owned have by sheer conincidence had protection circuitry in them which shuts down the outputs as soon as a speaker short is detected. This has saved me agro on a number of occassions. However, the next amp I'm planning to get AFAIK doesn't have such protection, so I'll have to be extra careful.

 

Great idea for a thread, one of the most original threadsto be created here for ages.

I am really strugelling to think of anything, I was placed a speaker on top of my turntable while needing to get behind it, it cracked the lid, never bothered replacing it.

I bought a Sherwood tuner when I was 16 from Cash Convertors, it worked for about three months and then the microrpressor blew, £60 gone.

I bought a tunrtable for my mum from ebay, the wiring must be faulty going to the cartridge because it goes mono after the first track of an LP.

Have blown many headphones up, my Philips are amazing considering the still look brand new and everything else I have had from the likes of Beyer or Senheiser always break after a few months of solid use.

Most my expensive mistakes are a result of ill timed upgraded. I bought a PM4000 amp but then realised it didn't have enough power so replaced it a year later with a PM6010OSE.

The classic one was not realising my Cambridge DAC had co-axial rather than optical outputs. They use funny connectors I miss took for an optical output so I paid £8 for a cable, then I found out it was wrong. To make matters worse they are now selling them cables in the £1 shops.

I always turn my amp and source off if doing any rewiring work so have never had an accident yet.

 

I think the brain does block out the unfortunate events. Must be a good thing otherwise we will be depress forever. After thinking for a long time, it came back to me. It was on one dark night when I have this desire to find out more about one of the unsolve mystery in hifidom.

Whether interconnects sound different to each other during a blind comparison. During the vigorous swaping of ICs from the back forgot to switch off the Linn during plug and unpluging. Puff. The thing died. Need some chips replace. They have a good service but expensive.

 

Nothing major league but I wrecked a good few records as a student. I had a Sansui turntable and after a year or so where no matter how you adjusted the arm, it skipped and skidded around on the record (nothing to do with me pogoing around the room at the time...). So I sellotaped an ever growing heap of coins to the headshell By the time I'd finished, the needle was ploughing so deep into the vinyl it was digging up tracks laid down by the Romans...

 

Damn Pioneer. Bollox! Worked for 30 minutes before igniting. Not particularly expensive, but traumatic.

 

I once had a yellow duster fight with an Ortofon MC10 Supreme.

Tony.

 

A modified Quad 405/2. I blew it up...driving headphones!

It sounded great until the smoke started. An easy fix though, and a shameful wiring mistake whch caused the problem....

 

My PM4000 kept cutting out driving headphones, it also blew the drivers of my Sen HD495s which Richer Sounds luckily sent off to repair.

Cookie - Did you own this igniting amp from new?

 

Buying the DAC20 blind and discovering that I prefer my CDP. So, sold the DAC20 (at a £100 loss) and bought an Entech Number Cruncher 205.2 (I think) S/H which sounded better to me at a bake off. However, unplugged/replugged the slightly dodgy optical connector one time too many to find that it no longer works. Unsoldered the optical receiver and found that it was obsolete. Ordered it's replacement (according to various suppliers on the 'net) from US (for about £6 plus £30-35 delivery :cry: ) only to find that it's not compatible. Sent for repairs and it comes back working . After 30 minutes all I could hear was white noise from the left channel (I understand that it was due to bad unsoldering of the optical receiver on my part which damaged a track). Sent it back for repairs and a new psu and new caps. It comes back sounding better than it did. All in all, the DAC cost me over £500 I reckon including the original loss on the DAC20 which I only used for a few hours.

 

My Pushed in tannoy super tweeter :cry: im soooo skint at the mo and cant seem to get through to tannoy im dying to replace it as it has degraded the sound considerably :cry: things were sounding sooooo sweet before...no more houseparties ever!! Mind you i got with a really hot girl that night so it kinda balances it out... i think its fate

Ultra

 

I know which one I would rather have, and its not the tweeter

 

I went to take a record off the platter of my Focus One after it had finished player. I reached out but when I got near it I gave a static electric shock that through me backwards anout 6' or more !

 

Sounds a bit more than a static shock to me, did you check to make sure the unit was properly earthed? I am I mean in the in the plug, not the earh that connects to the amplifier.

 

Believing the marketing hype has got to be mine.
Here's a couple of examples:

1. The Cyrus 2/PSX combination I bought following very good reviews. Then 6 months after buying it hearing a Nait (not sure if it was a 1 or 2), but the Nait murdered my Cyrus 2, despite the Nait being cheaper

2. Buying a CDP. At the time my system wasn't any great shakes, and it sounded similar to my record deck, so I bought a lot of CDs. One year in and I was offered an LP12 at a good price. It made the CD sound cr@p. So I spent £400 on a DAC, which made it better, but still not as good as the LP12. Eventually I sold the LP12 thinking that I could focus on CD, and have been through 5 further CD/DAC combos trying to get a decent front end.
It's still not as good as a decent record deck, and if I'd realised this back then, I would have simply never bought a CDP. That would have given me a whole lot of dosh to spend on LPs.