Your Worst Audio Breakdown

I haven't had any big issues with my gear, Levinson, Ayre, Audio Research, anything that did go down got fixed promptly, and my dealer always lent me something interesting.
A friend had a tube mono amp go up in flames once, it almost took his house with it, luckily he was in the room with a large glass of beer in his hand.

My worst piece of equipment was a Sonic Frontiers CD Transport. Though I bought it new with a five year warranty, Sonic Frontiers was never able to make it play most CD's.
I sent it to Canada 2 times at my shipping expense only to get it back exactly the same way. Sonic Frontiers said I had faulty redbook CD's !!!
Anyway, after airing this dirty laundry on the internet, thier were many protests on my behalf. Chris Johnson finally gave in and gave me a full refund. I still have copies of those postings in case Chris wants to chime in.

I ended up selling my Sonic Frontiers Dac soon after. I wanted no part of that company and Chris Johnson.

Over the last 25+ year I've had many failures. The worst was smelling, then seeing smoke coming up from my Krell amp. I had purchased it used from a store in Chicago. I call Krell they asked a few questions and then they give me an RA number. I waited at few weeks, called and asked what it would cost and when it would be ready. The nice lady said, it shipped two days ago and no charge. I'll always remember the smell. These days I always buy from well respected companies.

I've been really lucky over the past 35 years. Only amps have given me problems and they were minor. My old Kenwood M2 developed a cold solder joint after 15 years and a local shop resoldered a bunch of joints and it has been fine ever since-still powering up the Double Advents in the garage after 25 years. I had a massive Rotel RB-1090 power amp that was known for fusing its power switch in the "on" position and mine did it and that was kind of cool. The dealer fixed it under warranty. That's it but I've been mostly a SS owner. Sometimes I think we need another forum category here for tube guys and gals for topics like, "why do I have hum?, my amp stopped working, my left channel cuts in and out, I hear hiss" etc. Oh yeah, My brand new PSB Synchrony Ones that I used to have came with a loud mechanical buzz inside one of them but it was just the crossover board that hadn't been screwed down tight and I fixed that myself.

There was another episode, not a failure, but idiots at SOTA. I bought their Time Domain speakers from a local dealer and had problems getting them in the right spot, then problems finding the right seat height. I ended up having to sit on a bar stool to get the sound to where it gelled. When I made comparisons with the ones in the store, I gave it up to the problem being my room.

The sales rep at the store was a woodworker and proposed making some new enclosures for the speakers with exotic woods. When I removed the old drivers and crossovers from the old enclosures, I was shocked to find some crossover componenets missing from the board on one of the speakers. I called SOTA and they said it was no big deal and shouldn't make any difference!

In the end my insistence showed this was the root of the problem I was dealing with for a year and a half.