SaferProducts incident

Failure type

Electrical shock / short

Incident narrative

SaferProducts.gov consumer incident report 20180712-EBDD8-2147386831. Severity: Incident, No Injury. Product: Sony SRSXB3 (Sony Bluetooth speaker model SRSXB3). Incident: Earlier this year, I was at a hotel in the Las Vegas NV area when I went to plug in my Sony Bluetooth speaker model Number SRSXB3 into a lamp's electrical outlet to recharge it and I almost received a serious electrical shock from doing this action. A significant amount of sparks discharged from the outlet and burnt the lamp near the outlet and also charred the plug for the speaker. The speaker was less than a year old at the time of this incident. I contacted the speaker's manufacturer Sony a short time after and filed a complaint with the company in May 2018. Sony instructed me to send the speaker and charger to [REDACTED] in Syracuse NY for an evaluation. [REDACTED] Job # [REDACTED] and Sony Safety Case # [REDACTED] were provided to me. [REDACTED] supposedly did not find any problems with the speaker or charger during their evaluation. However, I am not so certain that this product is not defective and a potential safety hazard to customers as I or someone else could have been injured from this safety incident. Sony appears to be indifferent to this situation and does not seem to be taking it very seriously. Therefore, I thought it was appropriate to file this complaint with the US Consumer Products Safety Commission as other consumers who own this Sony Bluetooth speaker model may be at risk. It would appear that there was some type of short circuit in the lamp and the speaker was not properly designed or grounded. I am hoping that CPSC will actually investigate this incident.