Premature gear defenestrations

hide45 I'm a pretty common fella, I had to look up what defenestrations meant.

I saw a guy drop a Kenwood 9600 off a 2 story building and watch it explode when it hit the bolder in the back yard... It blew up for the 4th time.. Driving Infinity Kappa 9.0.  It took a 100 pounds of Krell to drive those things.. 1980 or real close. That Kenwood was a powerful unit for its time.. It would drive anything else for sure.. It wasn't cheap either..

That was pretty funny, though..

I came up with this question because sometimes people make changes to their gear without first realizing its potential. People may not realize that tubes can be changed, or that a number of other factors could either be optimized -- room, electrical, etc.

Some, like @ghdprentice haven't made mistakes -- they do their research and only move cautiously. The question of this post isn't for the non-mistake-makers, really, but I like the description of his process.

@mapman mentions, truly, that good sound is largely very subjective thing and uncertain. The question doesn't presume otherwise; I'm asking what mistake *you* made and then realized it was a mistake for *you.* In other words, the issue of objectivity isn't invoked by the question -- or at least that was not my intent.

Well the only fix for the guy chucking the receive off the roof was to change speakers. I know I bought and fixed them.

The fix was 30.00 usd , but the guy world have nothing to do with a fix that was reflected in the 9.1 series.. No idea why. I paid 600.00 for the 2k speakers at the time.. I know I fixed at least 10 pairs of the Kappa 8.0s and 9.0

That 30.00 fix cost HIM 1400.00 dollars. Great speaker but they sure had a rep for killing amps..

It wasn’t my mistake, but it sure was his.. That was one hard headed fella.

Typical rich kid..

Regards

I think I've only defenestrated one piece:  an old boom box/recorder (a Toshiba I believe) that was fantastic; one day, it seemed to develop a random CLICK that I could not trace.  Within seconds of baseball-batting the thing over a chair-leg, I discovered the CLICK was coming from the on/off cycling of my electric blanket.

I’ve sold and regretted quite a lot over the years. There are many instances when I’ve sold and rebought later. There even are a few instances where I’ve sold and rebought a piece 2 or 3 times! But as time marches on and the system has evolved upwards...I’m hard pressed to think of a piece that I’ve sold (at least) once that I couldn’t live without today, or that I think was close enough to achieving next-level "nirvana" to warrant current best-available tweaks & tube treatments.

Probably the closest is when I sold my VAC Renaissance III preamp w/ phono stage option. I could certainly live without the line stage section (even though it was nice) - that’s why I sold it. But wow, did I ever miss its phono stage. I tried to convince myself so hard the Rogue Ares was on par with it - but it wasn’t. I sold and rebought the Ares 2, 3 times (including Magnum upgrade version) trying tube rolling, SUT rolling, and all manner of tweaks to bring back that VAC phono sound. Each change seemed to bring temporary relief for a day or 2 - but then inevitably melted away leaving me where I was before. Finally I just bought the (then) new VAC stand-alone Renaissance phono stage, and even though it cost a lot it was well worth it.

I would’ve been happier, with less wasted time and money if I’d kept the VAC Ren III just for its phono stage (even bypassing the line stage, as necessary) until they released their standalone Renaissance stage.