Shorting the speaker wires

Deaf_j:

Brilliant!

I feel sort of like an idiot in saying this but when did crossing my speaker wire terminations become a stereo system catastrophy. I blew the S*** out of an SS amp by doing just that a fews years back. Now I am hyper to the extent I can muster hyerpertude.
I still have this thinking from my first days as an audiophile that you can safely touch a "live speaker wire" and must have crossed them a few hundred times in the 1970s. To this day Ralph Karsten will drop a quarter on his binding posts -that stops the sound- but once removed causes no apparent damage. So my question is literally. When did I need to be worried about this?
I bought a McIntosh 2505 that had a difference in gain between the two channels at a discoount even by used standards. I then had one chanel go altogether for no obvious reason, but I am very certain it was not idiotic crossing of speaker wires. My friend's Dad fixes all things (has an EE and experience) and managed to get this piece back into it's original state of partial disrepair. My friend told me that I shorted the S*** out of it. I denied it. He couldn't help himself and insisted I did so repeatedly because his father whom I really do admire said I did.
I knew I messed up the other times this happened this has happened all of twice, in the last 7 years. It's not exactly bland. There is no mistaking the flames if you get my gist. I simply did not this time and haven't had other problems. I never had a directly voltage coupled output from the speaker posts to my knowledge. If crossing wires were as bad as they have apparently become or were, I should be quite dead by this method which as of this writing appears to be a very innefective technique.
Obviously I take nothing for granted anymore.

Yeah,I've done that on my Mark Levinson 27.5 amp,years ago.
I was using the Monster bananas and speaker cables.The bananas accidentally touched because the speaker cable was so heavy gauge that caused them to slip.Nothing happened to the amp ,there is a protection circuitry that kicked in and saved the amp,but since then I covered the bananas with shrink tube socks.
Hope your amp is fine.
George

Some amps are tolerent of shorting, and many are not.

Some amps also are not tolerent of having no load on the speaker terminals at all.

I have also seen a friend damage a speaker by hot swapping a RCA cable. The connection thump caused an arc in his Quads.

John C.

My CarverPro ZR1600 amps have Neutronic output terminals, which I have never used. I use the binding posts with bare wire terminations (or should I say non-terminations). The Neutronic connectors are a twist-lock design, with a contact wiping action when you mate them, and where there is no exposure of the metalic terminations. They are widely used for pro audio.

However, when I installed in-wall wires for a second system I used Neutronic connectors, jacks mounted in the wall and plugs on the speaker wires. I am impressed with these devices.