What has been your costliest mistake in this hobby?


For example :I recently learned a hard lesson- I accidentally ran voltage thru my $3000 MC cartridge (kiseki purple heart).  I have a TT with 5 prong connector and a phono cable with a 5 prong connector.  I accidentally swapped where they plugged into and ran electric thru the tonearm into the cartridge.  It was a stupid - not thinking- hasty mistake. When I corrected the problem the cartridge was fried.  An avalanche of four letter words followed!

So what has been your biggest and/or costliest mistake?
polkalover

Showing 1 response by sns

In my early days of diy modding fried out CJ MV-55 after upgrading all caps, still have the fried thing, someday...  Another early modding attempt building a mm only phono preamp, adding tubes and many circuit changes, adding step up transformers to the design, couldn't get it to fire up, still have this one as well. This one wasn't a great financial loss, but lots of labor time.  Think I know what's wrong here, so have future plans for resurrecting.

Diy  modding can be expensive early on, hopefully one learns. Haven't damaged any thing in the past ten years or so. I suppose I could rationalize these aren't losses as they've taught me what not to do. Still, I'd like to get both units up and operating just to see how they sound.