You made me curious as to what caused the issue, perhaps this was a Tube Guitar Amp?
In
electronics,
motorboating is low frequency
parasitic oscillation (unwanted cyclic variation of the output voltage) that occurs in audio and radio equipment and often manifests itself as a sound similar to an idling
motorboat engine, a "put-put-put", in audio output from speakers or earphones.
[1][2][3][4] It is a problem encountered particularly in
radio transceivers and older
vacuum tube audio systems,
guitar amplifiers,
PA systems and is caused by some type of unwanted
feedback in the circuit. The amplifying devices in audio and radio equipment are vulnerable to a variety of feedback problems, which can cause distinctive noise in the output. The term motorboating is applied to oscillations whose frequency is below the range of hearing, from 1 to 10
hertz,
[3] so the individual oscillations are heard as pulses. Sometimes the oscillations can even be seen visually as the
woofer cones in speakers slowly moving in and out.
[2]Besides sounding annoying, motorboating can cause
clipping of the audio output waveform, and thus
distortion in the output.