What Hardware Have You Blown Up By Accident ?

[D-Fusion]

Amd Ryzen 5 5600X One day it came a weird smell from my newly built PC and the next day the Cpu light Powered up on the Motherboard and i only got a Black Screen.
Guess i was one of the unlucky ones that got a funky Cpu and i got a Refund and upgraded to a Amd Ryzen 5700X.

[whyterabbyt]

My werkstatt. I dont think I connected the CV expander properly. magic smoke escaped.

Ive also had computer PSUs explode. A batch of about 20 stupidly budget units, they all started to fail around the same time, some of them more, erm, forcefully than others. One actually jetted 6" flames towards my face as I was leaning towards it... unnerving.

[BertKoor]

When I was about 10 or 12 I learnt how speakers work: they need a fluctuating current. Hey, the power sockets provide an alternating current as well! Lets try how that sounds. Well, the sound is "Poof!" and this is a good way to clean an old speaker cone from years of collecting dust. So better check the specs of a speaker and apply the law of Ohm in reverse: 220V into 4Ω --> 12kW.

When the specs of a (guitar) speaker says it can take 100W peak, then don't feed it 100W RMS and expect it to live long. First (some months of weekly rehearsals) the coil windings will get loose, giving a "special" kind of distortion. Not what you want. How do I know it was loose coil windings? By taking it apart ofcourse. Boy are those speaker magnets strong. Stronger than the chassis they are mounted on.

Which makes me think, after a gig someone made a manoevre/pilot error with some (my) PA speakers stacked on a handtruck. The pile tumbled, the top one landed face up flat on the ground. Apparently moment force of inertia was enough for the magnet to separate from the speaker. Wish I knew that disassembly method earlier, because the chassis was still OK. My reassembly strategy needs some work though. Boy are those speaker magnets strong!

[spigmu]

In my solo days, my roadie (actually my best mate) once plugged the wrong PSU into my Zip Drive, when we were setting up for a gig, and killed it. That meant I had to load stuff into my sampler from floppy disks all night. Not the end of the world but annoying, nonetheless. Since then I have always been really anal about clearly marking which PSU is for which device.

Oh man. I'm not the most fastidious labeler but power supplies get serious Brother P-touch big bold naming on two sides since my personal debacle. I was working at a studio decades ago, using my Metric Halo interfaces, the supplies of which very unfortunately fit into the OWC external hard drives. Everything was powered at the same under desk location and in a moment of rush to set up plugged both the 2882 and ULN-2 power supplies into two OWC drives. Fried. I had to bolt down to a Best Buy, which at the time sold bare WD drives, sometimes on sale, and furiously set about swapping enclosures and trying to revive drives and restore backups onto the new drives before the boss showed up. It was a very tense few days restoring the drives from a horrible Retrospect tape drive system a few hours at a time when no one was around, and eventually no one noticed that the drives and cases had been swapped out. But I was sweating bullets for the faux pax. And ever since then I pull out the labeler for the most mundane PS the second the box is opened.

[BONES]

I feel your pain. In my early live performance days, I used to have to load my Yamhah QX-7 sequencer from cassette half-way through my set. What I used to do was record the backing for a cover version, usually Temple of Love, into tracks 1 and 2 of my Fostex 4-track, while tracks 3 and 4 had the tape storage that went into the sequencer. So I'd play one song with tape backing before going back to the sequencer and no-one seemed to notice or care. It alway smade me cringe, though.

[an-electric-heart]

A rackmount BBE Sonic Maximizer. I bought it of Ebay, and just plugged it in not realizing the little switch on the back by the power supply was set wrong for my country and instantly toasted it. And also a Presonus Blue Tube preamp, that time I just grabbed a power cable that fit and just plugged it in and tried it, but it was AC instead of DC (or vice versa) and again, just instantly wrecked it.

[Roman Empire]

Real men only blow up things on purpose - never by accident.

[melomood]

I have a much older bipolar half brother that wanted to be a guitar player just like Pete Townshend when he was younger. Windmill guitar playing and that......jazz
I got to learn things watching him,so

not really

[whyterabbyt]

A rackmount BBE Sonic Maximizer. I bought it of Ebay, and just plugged it in not realizing the little switch on the back by the power supply was set wrong for my country and instantly toasted it.

Oh, yeah, I killed a Behringer ADA8000 because the orientation of the fuse holder defines whether it thinks its running off 110v or 240v. ffs.

[CapnLockheed]

My car. Oh yeah......and my first electric guitar. In my defense, the salesman did say it was an ELECTRIC guitar.......I figured I needed to plug it into the wall socket to make it work.

[melomood]

I set a toaster oven on fire one time

[ThomasHelzle]

The best explosion I've ever had was my Presonus Firebox (the name is very adequate). Playing happily along something and BOOOOOOM, huge smoke mushroom, a flame shooting out the back...
Too bad, loved the thing.

Another audio interface I blew up was my GFs EMU (can't remember it's name). Plugged in a bass with a stereo/symetrical TRS cable by accident and the channel was instantly dead. To this day I don't understand that one.

Me and my GF tried how her new powered Bass would sound with my 12" Kustom Defender guitar tube amp. Went very well for a while (we played at home and with very low volume). Then she unplugged it and plugged it back in, started to play and BOOOOOM... another mushroom cloud out of the back. The technician showed us later how the PCB probably had a problem unrelated to what we did and shorted the whole thing. So we no longer have a tube amp...

Not music related, but also had a very impressive bang and mushroom from a very old and beautiful GDR "Textima" sewing machine that I restored to working conditions. Originally it had been a manual machine, but they added a motor later and that had one monster capacitor that was beyond it's best-before so my first test run blew it up for good...
But that machine is running perfectly to this day with the replacement I put in

Oh, speaking of toasters: I lived in a shared apartment for a while ages ago and they had one of those old-style toasters that flip out to the sides and only do one side. Thing was, it heated up automatically when you closed it and to put the lovely padded cloth-cover onto it, you of course had to close it...
One day I forgot to unplug it prior to that and only by accident I saw something flicker from the kitchen before I left for work... The flames were up to the upper shelves already.
That one was mindbogglingly - how can you construct something like that...
Accident waiting to happen...

So yeah, the others weren't really dangerous but that last one still haunts me...

Cheers,

Tom

[vurt]

old mini disc recorder.
slice battery open to reveal lithium core, replace in machine, drop machine in water, run.

[melomood]

Wow
I did not know this

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DwgdpysXUkA

[Constructed Identity]

Real men only blow up things on purpose - never by accident.

The real question: Has anyone recorded the sound of blowing some equipment up!