What's the Single Worst Piece of Audio Equipment You've Ever Experienced?

The worst:
Audio Technica ATH-M50x headphones. I needed a closed set and fell for the hype. When I tried them for the first time I was tempted to return them because I thought they were defective but then I got it that they were really supposed to sound like that.

Sony WH1000-MX3. I decided to try what active noise cancelling was all about. Apparently it's about blocking cyclic external noise and a large portion of the music you are interested to hear.

Pro-Ject Debut II turntable: When I decided to get a turntable I followed the recommendations and got myself the Debut II and found it was a POS. Everything there managed to irritate and frustrate me, the sound, the oozing aura of cheapness and shoddy construction, the lack of control. I simply stopped using it and a year later the belt disintegrated and turned into a blob of messy goo which gave me the incentive to throw it away in the trash.

 

I'm guessing it was the better sound through research.

 

Some Denon pro CD player DN500C
Nothing but problems and trouble.
Bought from a good seller, returned for repair, arrived worse than sent.
Refunded, no worries happy.
Poor CD player.
Then bought the Yamaha cds300. Amazing open, airy, stadium sound. Skipped on a song or 2, sent back, now regret it
Will find another. Great CD player.

 

I remember that turntable! We sold it in the HiFi store that I worked (part time) in, back in the early 90s. We had a 25 foot hose for the vacuum pump so that it could be stored in another room, cuz it was so noisy. Once you got everything setup just right it sounded fantastic. Big step up over the VPI HW19s and the Gyrodecs that we carried.

 

Supratek Syrah poorly built, hummed like crazy, and never sounded right in my system.

 

Space. But the real answer is I was and remain an idiot. Second pair of dq-10's as well.

But you have to admit, when it comes to downgrades, I am the winnah! or loseah!

 

I bought a NAD (New Acoustic Dimension) turntable that was a dealer demo from Commercial Electronics in Vancouver in 1980 or so. The motor could not have been louder if you had tried to engineer that feat. I wanted to love that one because NAD made good stuff but that was a terrible turntable!

I later replaced it in 1981 or 1982 with a Luxman PD 289. I had that for years and it was fantastic. It was built by Micro Seiki. My buddy liked it so much that he sold his Technics to buy one and he still has it!!!

 

Well thank you! Coffee all over my desk. Funny as h*ll.

 

Very funny

 

Easy for me - the Audiolab M-DAC, possibly the most overrated piece of grey, dull, lifeless and unmusical stuff to get plugged in chez moi. For some reason it has a fanatical following on one of the UK's premier audio sites - geek city.

Historically, I once used the much-loved Naim SBL speakers. Dreadful. Even with a NAP250.

Not to start a (pillow) fight, but I really like the Elys 2 on my newish Planar 3 - needs at least an LP to warm up, then can do things my (stored) AT150MLX can't. And no hum here.

 

What was wrong with it? Problems reading discs? Mine works fine by the way

 

Not home audio listening whatever equipment but I feel it is my duty to inform y'all that this:

Roland Cube 20GX Guitar Amplifier | World of Music

Is the nastiest sounding lump of poo ever.

Doesn't matter what pickups, what guitar... I've heard Jacskons, a Gibson Explorer... normally sweet sounding Deans through one and it manages to make everything sound harsh and atrocious.

And it won't take pedals, at ALL.

 

Crossley

 

Get your buckets ready for it:

Bane of my teens having to 'listen' and I use that term loosely to this crock o (insert four letter word) that as all in one music centre set my teeth on edge where it lived in the common room of a boarding school.
Where do we start with this? Biggest crime was a grossly underpowered power supply section that meant anything that had any bass pulled down the amplifier voltage to the point you could hear the audio output drop. Playing anything like Organ music or tracks with a lot of drumming like Ant Music at average levels would produce that effect.
The tape section featured as many did automatic record level but for one thing it the rise and fall times were such you could clearly hear it pumping up anything with noise or rumble and pulling it down rapidly and for good measure it typically put +4 db on ferric tapes pushing it high frequency saturation when measured on my own (needless to say superior cassette deck) at the time.
One might forgive the BSR semi automatic deck and ceramic cartridge had it not been for some obvious express train style rumble and the lack of a finger guard to cue records with.
The speakers had plastic backs, single units with little bass and nothing above about 10khz with very poor transients.
It was ghastly, one reason I had a stereo portable cassette deck, stash of taped albums and headphones in the dorm.
The bucket for any sympathy payments is to be found at the end of the post.

 

Agreed, but for me it's Audio Note speakers in general including the near highest end AN-E. They just terribly fail to capture the essence of classical music, particularly symphony music. Playing things like Tchaikovsky symphonies with their wide gamut of tonal color and dynamic range just end up sounding flat, compressed and 1 dimensional. This is not just restricted to hifi shows either, but dealers that had been representing their brands for a very long time with optimal AN suggested setup. I thought perhaps piano recordings would be more forgiving but those too failed to satisfy with the best piano recordings resembling what I heard with the orchestra and the tonality of the piano just sounds off, probably due to their non linear frequency response.

I saw Andrea Lucchesini live recently (my Imgur album here) and there is no way AN speakers could convincingly reproduce the fortisimmos heard on Schubert's D959 sonata (it would require quite some imagination). Unsurprisingly these are not just my thoughts either but anyone I've talked that has a serious interest in reproducing what real life classical sounds like. And probably why at hifi shows they cleverly select their music to be acoustic guitar plus male or female vocals.

 

Any semblance of quality in a Bose loudspeaker crept in by accident.

 

For me it was the Rega Apollo which died after 2 years, got it fixed by Rega's guy in CA, and it died again in another 2 years. I brought it back to the dealer and left it there!

 

They can take a long time break in. My 802D’s sounded horrible until about after 4-5 months. Now they are simply amazing.

 

I used Russian K40Y-9 coupling caps, refined power supply to low AC ripple, swap tubes- yuk. Built a 6P5GT tube preamp and it was excellent. I was using triode connected parallel PP 6V6 mono block amps that were incredible.

 

my grandad's Philco radiogram

 

Proac 2.5's...these had me covering my ears...it was like dipping the sound into liquid nitrogen.

B&W Nautilus 801/804...I liked the previous Matrix series speakers but these sounded disjointed with bright, steely treble, sucked out presence, forward upper mids, sucked out lower mids (warmth band), but good realistic bass (I was tempted to disconnect the mid drivers and tweeters and use these as subwoofers). The alternating peaks and suckouts in these speaker's power response, not to mention a quacky sounding coloration in the mids, left these speakers sounding unrealistic and downright weird to my ears. I put much of the blame on the FST mid driver (which was not used in the previous Matrix series).

...and lest I sound like I am picking on speakers, the Conrad Johnson Sonograph line of amps (their solid state line at the time) sounded veiled and murky to my ears...so did a few of their contemporary tubed units.

Audiomat Arpege Tubed (EL-34 based) Integrated amp...sounded exceedingly dark, veiled and murky...this was the first time I realized that tube amps (depending on the circuit and the speakers used) can also sound bad

Back to speakers...the much hyped KEF Blade speaker drove me out of the room...it sounded bright, unrealistic and hifi-ish.

I was also surprised at how bad the much hyped MBL Radialstrahler Speakers sounded (maybe it was the room and setup).

I tried to like the many Vienna Acoustics speakers that I have heard (Hadyn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler...) but the sucked out presence always bothered me (they actually wire their crossovers out of phase so that the presence suckout is a permanent feature).

I auditioned some Mission 735 speakers that sounded like they were voiced for a disco...loud, aggressive, in your face, with fast one note bass (they had a big peak at 70 Hz to give the illusion of low bass, even though there wasn't any).

The Aerial Acoustics 10T sounded hard, dry and unbalanced to me.

I really wanted to like the JMR Twin Speakers but they sounded veiled, disjointed and uninvolving to me.

I could go on and on.

 

A radio shack mixer is the single worst sounding unit that I have ever experienced inside of my system. When I was a kid I was running a 20+ year old stock Dynaco Pas 3 which my Dad had handed down to me a in 7th grade. But it had stopped working properly after a couple years, so I needed an alternative phono preamp to fill the gap until I was able to figure-out what was wrong with my PAS3. Tube swapping didn't help, and I had very little money, so taking it a a repair shop was only going to be my last resort.

Anyways, I had purchased this cheapo SS radio shack mixer so that I could attempt some live recording. And since it had a phono input on it, it seemed perfectly suited to act as a spare preamp. It functioned OK in that role, except that I noticed that the sound was hard and unpleasant the longer that I listened to it. I had assumed at the time that since it was SS that it would sound better than that old tube preamp that my dad had given me. Boy was I ever wrong about that! Frankly I was shocked by how bad it sounded. And yet its specs were better than those of my PAS3, so this made zero sense to me at the time.

Unfortunately the longer that I listened to it, the less that I liked its sound, and the more motivated I felt to figure out how to fix my old tube preamp. At the time I only knew a little about electronics, but I was interested in learning as much as I could about them. So I started replacing parts in an attempt to get the PAS 3 working again. With the help of our next door neighbor who was a retired Boeing engineer, I was able to borrow his ancient Eico (tube) capacitor tester. And eventually I found that the filter can in the power supply had gone bad. And since filter cans like this were not something that you could find at your local electronics stores, I had to build a new circuit board to mount my new discrete caps onto. When I put it all back together, my Pas 3 was working again, and my system sounded SO much better! It was a total relief to get my PAS 3 up and running again.

And so about 35 years ago, this horrible sounding Radio Shack mixer inadvertently began my journey into repairing, and then modifying audio equipment, as well as my lifelong love affair with tubes, all at the same time. And it really opened my eyes to just how different some preamps could sound, and how the right one had the potential to make or break a system.

 

No, it didn't.

 

The Kenwood car CD cartridge player sold to me by "this really good" of a workmate, who ran the sales department, and apparently has a surplus of these things (woder why...); digital-to-audio conversion was atrocious!
Not only that, but the tech parked the car too close to the one behind it...and left the stick in reverse! Little extra charge on that job...

 

Was that the NAD 5120 Tesla TT with the flat arm? Yes the motor can get noisy but they're cheap to replace (its still used by Rega) The arm setup is a challenge but when its in tune it works very well indeed. Not one of those plug and play decks, to be sure!