Recordings that trounce your system?

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.

That was a great story SD! I had a pair of the 565's & ran them with a set of the old style Kappa 8's. I had to wear earplugs when I cranked up anything past the 10 to 11 o'clock position if I didn't want my ears to ring. When asked why I played the stereo so loud I had to wear earplugs, I would say I wanted to have a concert in my living room. I sold the amps a few years ago & used the money to buy a Honda civic.

Driver, is that Civic the dual mono or the hi-current version?
Cheers!

Uh, it's the I wish I never bought it version. Actually, not a bad deal for an '84. It's still running.