Columns Retired Columns & Blogs |
Someone deliberately burned out the output transformers of my pair of McIntosh MC60s, and I didn't find out until I moved 1600 miles away.
It could have been a stupendously bad purchase or, perhaps, a cat running across the turntable while your first-pressing Parlophone Beatles LP was playing. What stands out as your biggest audio disaster?
Since I had no disaster this year, I'll write of last year's when my dog ate two pairs of headphones and my SACD remote control. That darned puppy stage; best dog in the world now—doesn't chew anything that isn't hers. For music, it would have to be a purchase of Antony and the Johnsons—yuck! That voice is just a little too forced.
I recently lost a lot of work with my entire music collection as my hard disk died and my backup was a few months-too-many old. In between, I had converted a ton of CDs and such to FLAC. Hours and hours of converting and household work—so much I'm considering using a hard disk recovery service company that only costs a few hundred USD if you can wait a month. I'm thinking I can work that off faster than the time I will have to use to restore those files.
Trading in a Hafler DH110 preamp I built myself, and getting a sucky Sony 1000ES preamp. The digital bells and whistles on the Sony soon became tiring, and I stopped listening to music. I am very sorry I sold a great little preamp for one that was a chunk of catshit. Never again.
I was working for an audio retailer, and a colleague and I were moving around an Infinity Beta subwoofer with spikes installed in the feet. I finally had it positioned where I wanted it and I put one of the spikes down right in the power cord, causing the + and - to arc, and flames (or at least some really bright electric light) flew out of the back of the plate amplifier. The smell let us immediately know that we had done it in. We let the manager find out later.
Attempting to install an upgrade volume control in an expensive tube preamplifier and, botching the job, then sending it to the designer to finish the job—only to be told by his techs never again to touch a soldering iron! The preamp never quite sounded the same.
Having recently (at the time) acquired a Sherwood S-6000, I played the Telarc 1812. When the cannons went off full-tilt, one of the output tubes imploded. Sadness. I still have the tube, with the glass envelope deformed to the point of looking like a vortex to a black hole. Who did I piss off in a previous life to deserve that?