Weird Phenomenon With Old Stereo Receiver

The little musicians caged inside the radio were shooting out flares in hopes of being rescued.

Oh that was good...

Or maybe you were having some sort of failure of either an electrolytic capacitor or film capacitor? In over 40 years of electronics work, I have not come across anything quite like that.

Progressive, intermittent failures are very unusual in electronics. Usually the magic smoke comes out all at once.

Here is a picture of a film capacitor that shorted internally.

Something was shorting out or over heating and melting into a bubble, then the bubble would burst and send some of the material flying off. Most likely winding insulation on a small transformer or inductor that was failing, which would explain why it kept working for a while longer after the fireworks began.

I thought of this but it I don't think that would account for the light emission.

Careful, you're telling your age and ......

OT, really?

I get it, no humor allowed.

I guess a lmgtfy entry would have been better received?

I thought it humorous

Thanks. And for that you got 5 OT's.

Not sure what's happened here.

I have un-marked my response as OT. We'll see if the mods, or the OT bot, notice.

I see it and wouldn't mark it OT -- unless this side conversation takes over the thread. We all need a little more humor these days. Of course it's not my moderating shift ...

Moderators have shift's ? Do they also have over time and vacation pay ?

Exactly how does one become a moderator ? Are they appointed, voted in or nominated ?

Last question first: only IEEE GlobalSpec employees can be moderators. So yes, we have paid vacation along with other benefits. All the mods are volunteers; we volunteered because we're interested in the community and are invested in its success. We have assigned shifts but it's common to drop in anytime to keep up with a thread or start a new one.

lol nope smoking anything and was usually just tuned into the local rock station.

Trust me when I say I understand this is unusual. I have wondered about this for years since I saw it. I've never seen anything like it since. I wish I was wise enough back then to take it apart and look through it. I was proly around 14 or 15 when this happened so my head was most likely elsewhere.

Either way I'd love to be able to reproduce it and get to the bottom of it.

On the serious side, the only electronic components I can think of that might eject material are electrolytic capacitors, and I'm not sure this would occur repeatedly. You might look and see if there are any swollen capacitors visible. (This is just a wild guess!)

https://www.quora.com/What-causes-capacitors-to-explode

Oops, just reread your post. I guess this is a historical account and you can't go look.

Oh you must be Hutchison. Weren't you?

Solid iron liquify? All three terms are clearly false!

must have been a

Was it really a stereo? Or was it...

AN INTEROCITER!!!

Yup! had to be an Interociter! It eventualy blew itself up.

I think you had a rather industrious spider living in the receiver....every day she would spin some web here and there and likely there was a support linking a live wire to ground....she had many babies that would at any one time would be traversing this particular anchor point of the web, and that is what you saw, exploding baby spiders.....haha

A phantom dingo ate my babies...

"Every once in a great while I would catch it out of the corner of my eye and it would look like a small flash in mid air."

Ball lightning? Seems highly unlikely that it could generate the voltages required.

Somewhat off-topic, but I used to experience a 'pinging' sound in my living room for about a year before I finally traced the source. It turned out to be from a cheap ceramic ashtray, many of which were given out at an exhibition by Cambridge Scientific Instruments. It must have been under stress and as it passed through a certain temperature it emitted this very noticeable sound. There were no visible flaws on it's surface.

Then, of course, there was the 'thud' in our house just before a nearby lightning strike occurred, which I posted on this site a few years back and received several responses from others who had also experienced this.

Unusual phenomena - always interesting.

Pea sized ball lightning is the best description I have come up with over the years of thinking about it. It would explain the light output, movement, the pop at the end. Though I have no idea what could be the cause. I have no idea what voltages are need to reproduce this but it seems to only require the components inside an 80's stereo receiver.

This wouldn't happen to be a stereo tube amplifier? Many audio tube amplifiers drive the input of a step down transformer with high voltage low current power to output low voltage high current power a speaker uses. This would be unusual for an 80's era stereo with a built in cassette deck but not impossible. Lots of esoteric audio designs exist.

I can say with 90% - 95% certainty that it was not tube based. If it was I would have kept it around.

Is #3 like fish stories ?

I think you are on the right track, and that this is a biologically driven phenomena....actually quite a common thing called floaters and flashes...

https://health.clevelandclinic.org/your-eyes-understanding-flashes-and-floaters/

Memories easily fail. Particularly a memory of something not understood.

Can you, or anyone else in your family remember what the make and model was. It's very unlikely that yours was the only one that produced these pyrotechnics.

@Rixter lol while those could in some circumstances explain this it is highly unlikely as this would happen at any point in the day and was heard by multiple people.

@Randall I wish I did. If I did I'd hop on ebay and look for another one to buy. The pic in the link below kinda sorta looks like it.

Those were the stereos with the brushed metal front panel and real artificial hardwood looking wooden cabinets.

You can see quite a few of these being sold at estate sales here in Hemet.

If you happen to be in this neck of the woods.

Do you have a video or a still image ?

I here there are miniature UFO's that can invade stereo equipment.