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My Naim components are built to last forever.

Spilled barley pop into an amp (not mine, thankfully!) while doing a wild jig to Root Boy Slim and the Sex Change Band's "Mood Ring" in my college years.

I took a crap on it.

Spilled liquids

By playing too loud, I destroyed the left Magnepan MG 3.6 of my old system. The membrane went bust! No point to repair it because of the cost!

And my GAS Son of Ampzilla, unlike the model on your sight, is still going strong.

My Grado SR60s, $60 Panasonic portable CD player, and HeadRoom Little Amp have some years left.

Cary 805 monobolck. The input transformer is off set to the right at the back and I had my hand on the left side of course. At a height of 30" I realized things were getting out of hand...and indded teh Cary experienced everything but a soft landing. With great relief nothing broke...

I was vacuuming and I decided to clean under my expensive tube amp. I set it up on its side with all the cables still connected then promptly knocked it over with the vacuum cleaner. Casualties: two Sovtek EL-34 output tubes, one Nordost SPM interconnect, and my ego. As Father Guido Sarducci always said, "I blame myself."

The Burmese cat decided that the record-thingy going round and round looked like fun, so leapt on to my Ariston turntable and trashed a Supex 900 MC cartridge. That was 12 years ago, and I no longer have the cat, nor the cartridge. It was sort of funny at the time, but expensive.

The needle twice in 26 years!

In a hurry to listen to my system in my new apartment, I did not switch over from 110 to 220 and burned up a power sub.

Hot swapping speaker cables on a Proceed HPA2, my profile is still visible on the wall from the flash burn!!

A long tale. I replaced a bunch of parts in my Quad II's they worked fine for a couple of years then I cleaned up the system and hooked the quads electrically out of phase. Unknown to me a thin unshielded power wire in the Quad was touching the case. Power was somehow fed through a Bryston 10B into a 3B taking out the 3B and one subwoofer it was driving. By the way the 3B was 23 years old and thus out of warranty. Bryston charged me $80.00 (canadian) to fix it. I love those folks. NHT wanted too much for the driver but I got one that was so much better than theirs I replaced the driver in the other sub to boot.

In the early 80's I played my AR-5 into the ground. After years of constant use one of the tweeter blew and a woofer cone somehow developed a hole.

in a well designed system, it is virtually impossible to destroy any of the equipment unless there is a manufacturer's defect, which in today's times is very unlikely. 99.9% of all faulty equipment is from user ignorance, abuse or both.

When I was a kid, I fried the tweeters in my dad's poor AR speakers. I was playing around with an AKAI open reel deck, messing with very high speeds and making crazy noises and high pitched sounds. Before I fiqured out what I was doing, the damage was done. I kept mum on the whole thing, and dad never understood why his once nice sounding system was now total crap. He later replaced the AR's with some crap from Bose, and has been a happy Bose man ever since. Sadly, I guess it's my fault that he's no audiophile these days.

I ran to the living room trying to track down an awful electrical fire smell. Smoke was billowing out the back of my Muse Model 160. Frayed wire installed while drunk and stoned fried the left channel.

Miswired a set of speakers to an amp and made a toaster!!

Around 1987, my system consisted of B&W 801F speakers, the original verions, with Adcom electronics and a Dalquist SW-1 subwoofer filling in the low end. I had two GFA555 amps, and was using them in mono bridged mode (about 600 watts into the B&Ws, which still wasn't enought...) before I got the subwoofer. I got the Dalquist active crossover with the sub, and thought that using the crossover to reduce the deep bass going to the B&Ws would reduce the amount of power they needed. Plus, the 555s sounded better in stereo mode than they did in bridged mode. That meant I had one amp I could use in stereo mode for the speakers, with the other amp available to drive the subwoofer. Now, the Dalquist sub was rated at 75 watts continuous input. I'd read frequently that too much power wasn't nearly as damaging to speakers as too little power, so I, uh, used the other GFA555 in bridged mono mode to power the sub. 600 watts into a speaker rated at 75 continuous... nothing succeeds like excess.. It sounded really good. One day I was outside helping my bud wash his boat. We had the doors and windows to the music room open with some Dead playing. All of a sudden, I noticed there was, like, NO BASS. I went inside, and checked the subwoofer. Nada. No output. Pushing in the woofer cone made a really ugly sounding grinding noise. Took it apart... I had MELTED THE WIRES ON THE VOICE COIL and FUSED THE FORMER. Dalquist wanted $350 for a new driver shipped from Germany, which was more than I'd paid for the sub and the crossover together. Sionara, subwoofer. Bummer. Ray "oops... oh, man..." Garrison

Polk SDA speakers required a common ground amplifier. My new Counterpoint amp had a common ground, but once I flipped the "reverse polarity" switch on the new Counterpoint pre-amp it fried every driver in the speakers, and blew a channel in the amp. The speakers were replaced with less fussy Apogees. The amp was repaired by Counterpoint, and still sounds great.

A defective VCR; it did not expeled movies, they got attached to the unit and the tape destroyed. I took it apart with a screwdriver, piece by piece and place it in the trashcan...

Several yrs ago I could not get a mfr to honor their written wty on a sorry new amp that I bought...based mainly on a Stereophile "review". After four failed attempts and an atty's nastygram, I had a friend drop it from his helicopter at 500ft on their executive parking lot early one Mon morning.

It's always nice to route that DSS audio signal through your $10,000.00 audio system, right ! Sure, except when the clouds appear and block your signal! I do not know if all receivers are plagued with this problem, however my Sony will destroy a set of tweeters before you can blink an eye. For whatever reason, when the DSS receiver looses the signal, due to cloud cover, a very high frequency will hit your tweeters will fatal force! In the event you have ribbons, you WILL loose both of them. A low volume setting will not save you. Before you watch that great new movie, and turn your audio amplifier on, make good and sure you are doing so on a CLEAR NIGHT, or your speakers are still in warranty.