Cory
A few anectodes
I have a magazine article from 1956, has teh Stancor Williamson amp in it. The authors go through the building etc etc etc. and then the test procedures, wrong current draw, red hot glow on one 807. So they admit they tear apart the bias circuitry, re-wire a bunch of stuff and still red glow blown fuse.... So they swap an 807 and turns out one of the 807's they had was bad.... My point is, even those guys, who are in some kind of lab, writing articles for some kind of famous magazine, got stuck w/ bad parts, and then wasted a bunch of time troubleshooting the wrong things....
Two more things, I've only heard a capacitor go bang because I hooked it up wrong. You didn't make that mistake! A mistake I seem to make more than I'd like to admit but will
I wasn't getting power to my ARP Avatar, thought it was the PSU. It provided power until hooked up and then no power. Frustrated as all get out. So I email a guy who works on these about rebuilding the PSU and he says your PSU is fine, you got a short somewhere. So I test for shorts on all the submodules (which have individual jacks) and sure enough a small filter cap had blown to a short.
Easy, and I have two full bags of 10uF capacitors I got from FreeGeek, so I desolder the bad one, and install a new one, and go to admire my handy work and notice that the minus sign is on the plus side. So I have to desolder the damn thing again, and switch it around, and in the meantime some of the beautiful hand drawn traces start to lift, not all the way, but just enough so that I'm going to be hard pressed replace that same cap again if I have to. And I think to myself, who do I think I am, here is this rare piece (only 300 made) and here I am putting capacitors in backwards....
But my second solder job held fine, that free part was all it took to get this machine back to making sounds that only an ARP synth can make, and I did it. And as soon as I hooked it back up to the cv/gate/trig on the Quadra, the Quadra memory started acting up, so back to the internet, searching for parts, but half the fun is finding some guy in England who has programmed CPU's for this thing.
You got a bad capacitor from wherever. Don't sweat it, the whole point of keeping this gear is keeping up with this gear. It's one capacitor and it isn't your fault.