Recordings that trounce your system?

Great story, SD! I have the old Stakatto! disc, which has recordings of a number of instruments and other things (the breaking glass cut was enough to have my wife come running into the living room to stop me from throwing our crystal into the fireplace!), including a Boeing 737 taking off at an airport. One day I was playing this at a very high volume when the whole system went silent. Turns out that the amplifiers (at that time a pair of ARC M300s) had a tube saver circuit that prevents the amps from blowing up when too much low frequency signal appears at the input, thereby shutting them down. So that one beat my system, I guess. Musically, any DG digital CD from the early 80s will also trounce my system, in that it'll get me running to the preamp to turn the thing off before my ears start to bleed.

Yet another Telarc 1812 story: I was sitting in my dimly lit living room with an Adcom 545 amp driving my old Ohm H speakers. As the cannons went off, I thought I saw a swarm of bugs flying through the room. Turns out that chunks of the foam surrounds on the 8 inch drivers were getting blown out. By the way, I re-did the surrounds and those H's are still happily playing at my dad's.

Ah yes the Telarc 1812! I've had lots of fun with that one; played thru my Kilpsch's we measured >125dB SPL with a lab-grade meter sitting on the living room coffee table. The cats run for cover & the wife sometimes even slams the door during her exit. Other listeners catch their breath; they never heard anything like it, except at the 4th of July fireworks shows.
There's another one called Time Warp (a mix of spacey-soundtrack hits ala Star Trek Theme etc.) with some hellacious dynamic transients that will just about kill many speakers. With 200 watts per horn speaker you get dynamic slam & punch-in-the-gut fireworks bass to die for.

Love the 1812 stories, LOL! I tried the Telarc on my (then) new cartridge. Had spent 1hr setting it up to *perfection* while system was warming up, etc. Played the final, cannonball, track and... nothing happened! I.e., the arm tracked perfectly well, the sound emerged from the speakers as expected etc. So I put up the volume further and played it again.
Uncannily, the sound was softer!

Took me some time to realise I had blown BOTH ribbon TWEATERS. Woofers & midrange were fine. (fortunately I had replacements.)

As Detlof, I went back to listening to music -- Mahler II to be precise. BTW, the latter is also a good test for systems!

What a fine thread this has turned out to be! Thanks Fam, for initiating it and thanks SDcampbell for sharing that wonderful story with us! RCprince, it is unfortunatly not only the DG cds from the early eighties. I bought Abado's rendering of the Beethoven Symphonies with the Berlin Philharmonics and it turned out to be unlistenable. It made me raging mad, because his rendering is more than interesting and hell Greg, I thought things like that could only happen to me. I blew my last set of tweeters in my old Servo Static of yore, in exactly the same way!
By the way, I remember an LP, it had the recording of a thunderstorm on the one side and on the other the sound of a huge steam locomotive plus train starting off from a station. I must still have it somewhere....it was done by one of the audiophile labels in the late seventies..I don't remember which. It brought the house down, especially the engine and our cats used to wonder where the rain came from, when I played the first side, which started very softly. Well the thunderclaps and the sound of the engine regularly made my woofers struggle in helpless wobble...and then there was a Miller and Kreissel direct disk recording of a live performance of a folk singer group. There was a cut on it, called "dry bones", which had some incredibly fast transients, closely miked ,at very high level of all sorts of percussive instruments. It was a deadly test for amplyfiers, most of which I could drive into distorting and clipping, except that good old Threshold Stasis II, which I had mentioned in another tread.