What is the most expensive mistake you have made?

during first week in new hi-fi career i was keen to make a good impression so when Ruark suggested their new talisman speakers work better with the treble out of phase i duly set up my next dem as such. only...

lots of smoke -no noise.

obviously a dodgy exposure X! so i reached for the XV instead.

lots more smoke - still no noise!

manager not v.impressed with new boy!

upon inspection it appears you had to take the shorting links out of the speakers first! and it had to be exposure-anyone else i might have stood a chance. ho hum.

 

most expensive mistake..??? erm...coming on these forums...!!

only joking of course...don't think I've made any real mistakes - but then I probably haven't taken many gambles...

I'd say some cables that I've bought I've sold on...

 

Thankfully not too many to speak of, but I do remember pointing an angle poise lamp with a 60W bulb at my beloved Ultimo 10X to warm it up (having read somewhere that it sounded much better that way). It worked great - as long as you didn't go off to do something else and forget to turn the lamp off - I lost one or two prized pieces of vinyl like that.

 

Bought a Mana Sound Frame. Did precisely nothing for anything placed thereon. Sold it to Bub, who's very happy with it.

Bought a pair of small B&W bookshelf speakers, thinking that they surely must perform the pants off the much older LS3/5As - guess what ended up in the attic...

Apart from those and one pair of expensive ICs that also did nothing for anything, I've yet to buy any hi-fi with which I've been unhappy sound-wise. Which merely seems to prove that I'll never make a real audiophile.

 

So someone poked your speaker's dome, but you got your dome poking something else - sounds like a fair exchange to me!

I hear you re houseparties - my mate PD had had my Epos ES14 speakers on loan for 2 years, and he brought them back to Exeter the weekend of a rather large houseparty. They were sounding ace too! Only one problem; the next day, he managed to knock one of them off the stand, using a space hopper (don't ask!). Nice massive gouge out of cabinet. A bit of dodgy bodgit&leggit work later, and I have the only Epos ES14s with "bespoke woodstain effect finish and extra cabinet texture" - thank god for "box within box" Epos cabinet construction!

Other mistakes (caused by me rather than a mate):
Had a Tony L moment - mine was a yellow duster/Ortofon 520 incident.

Also wrote off one of only 50 Dynavector 10x4Gold Hi's in the universe; was balancing the arm on the Rega using a stylus guage, and, err, ooops, where did that cantilever go?

Keep meaning to have it rebuilt mind you

Now my mate Vince can tell a few tails - blew up 2 pairs of Mordaunt-Short MS25is (Mega City Four at 4pm on the volume dial anyone??). He also had 1 Sherwood Dolby Pro Logic processor explode on him (nice arching) and he replaced that with a Marantz 4100 (IIRC) DPL amp, which, after he'd wired it all up, sounded ace in stereo. He switched in Pro Logic, and 4 foot flames promptly eminated from it. D'oh!

 

The religiously inclined might think that God has an opinion on AV
:JPS:

 

I think the prize goes to daytona!

Situations like this is why I have stuck to Rotel rb-991 amplifiers.

Auto thermal cutouts and 10 internal fuses that blow on any incompotence!

Only problem is if you forget to turn them off at night they have oveheated by the morning and jumped you electricity bill by £30

 

Letting my brother use my system to record to the pc using vagus or something, lots of feedback and two electrostatic tweeters with burnt holes in, little brothers eh.

Stuart

 

I rememeber about 6 years ago (I was about 13 at the time so dont laugh too much), having a knackered 60s record player / amp thingy lying around, and a similarly knackered old PC. Thinking it would be an interesting (note, use of interesting, not "good") idea to try recording some vinyl onto the PC, me and a mate made up a 3 1/2mm jack to 2 pin din (for dodgy old speaker outputs) leads and tried our luck. The computer didnt seem to mind, (no music came out, but nothing bad happened) but smoke started coming out of the record deck and it died after about 5 mins of trying to get it to work.
Thinking about it now it probably had just as much (if not more) to do with my dodgy soldering as a 13yo than anything else........

 

Shorted the the speaker wires on n Expoure model 18 power amp.

They don't like that Exposure amps. Smoke comes out of them and they stink.

Ron

 

mine was getting married, regretting it and getting divorced. cost me a fcuking bomb that did.
cheers


julian.

 

I did buy Hifi stuff which after a few months resulted to be a mistake but the price for this was nothing compared to the mistake I have done a few years before: The day before Sandoz and Ciba Geigy merged I was obseving very attentively a Sandoz option which would have expired the day after. I saw how there was demand on these option and was quite willing to buy some for about 2K quids. I had also a hand on the phone but then I got nervous and didn't call. The day after they were 180 times more expensive...

I will never forget that.

 

blown an output stage on a naim and an audio analogue. pain in t' ass to fix, managed the aa myself.

got some plug in phono boards the wrong way around, ie mm to mc and vice versa, caused a resistor to smoke.

tried to rewire a power amp and wrecked the pcb, has to be the worst moment.

must be a few others, too.

oh smashed a 300b valve.

trashed a dynavector ruby cantilever, they are really fragile, dv' mc's. another I know went the same way.

had 450 volts short circuit thro a valve amp rectifier and blow a few things, scary indeed.

had 6 mains shocks, ouch.

 

Tossd my money at the motorway toll booth catcher today and one 10p coin missed ....oooh the pain.

 

Bought a DCS combo and an Remiyo cdp not good

 

A linn Karma had a fight with my toddler daughter and lost. After that people couldn't understand why I had a fireguard around the hi fi.....

Bob

 

naim.

 

Buying any amps which didn't have valves in
Knocking a speaker off the stand and killing an lp.
Melting a coupling cap and wiping out a gold aero EL84 and a Mullard el84 ( :cry: )
Buying things from Russ when I was young and impressionable
Messing with bias before I knew what it did
Buying an Arcam CD62 a while ago.

 

Ripping the cantilever out of my Dynavector 10x4 Gold High (one of only fifty in existence). My fault for trying that Rega bias weight tweak - nice £150 tweak (new Ortofon 540!!!).

Finally did said tweak last night, and it KICKS ARSE!!!!

 

Another one of mine is buying my Sony STE300 for £80 why!!! Its just a bit of plastic with a display. An old £5 car boot sale job would sound just as good.

Also I once tried to replace the built in interconnects on my old Dual turntable, I ended up shorting the outputs as I couldn't get the solder neat enough. It went straight in the bin.

Selling my old Yamaha KX380 for £20 on ebay, it was a bloody good deck and I paid £80 for it second hand in 1999.

The best is probably a week ago I replaced my headphones because I thought the cable had finaly given up, it turned out it was a loose interconect on the back of my CDP, the cable was iffy though as it would distort if you moved.