Your most disappointing purchase or audition?


I've had a few.

bought a Naim Nait 3. Loved it in the store. Returned it within a week- way forward at home

Brought home some CJ preamp to audition perhaps 22 years ago. Noisy as anything and a turn off transient destroyed a tweeter (though years later i bought a CJ 17LS2 which I thought was the finest preamp I ever heard in my home)

Auditioned a VPI table (HW19) in a store- the store just could not get the belt to stay on. Bought a Rega instead. This was in perhaps 1990.

Fortunately, I never really experienced buyers remorse say 6 months or more after settling on a piece of gear.

Finally, there have been too many speakers that got stellar write ups which I just didn't care for.
128x128zavato
Demoed Vandersteen Quatro wood's with Sim Audio/Moon electronics, at a b&m. Presentation was odd w/ very large unnatural images and the tone was completely off and not real sounding at all... Not as bad as sone listed here but the sound as a whole was fake and unnatural. Quit disappointing from what I was expecting to hear.
Musical Fidelity NuVista M3 integrated... gaudy appearance and low fi sound quality. Simaudio W-6 monoblocks.
Purchased a Rogue 66 preamp. The absolutely worse sounding preamp I had ever owned. It was a early unit. Dull sounding and way too laid back for my taste.
During my sophomore year in HS, I purchased a 40wpc integrated amp, the Kenwood KA-305 for full list price,$200. That was a lot of paper route money in 1979!

http://vintageaudio78.blogspot.com/2010/11/kenwood-ka-305-photos.html

It sounded quite good with my dual tt and polk 5 speakers. I had it all through high school and at the end of my sophomore year at college, I sold it for $100 and bought the latest 100wpc Kenwood KA-7x (list price $400).

http://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/maya-kenwood-ka-7x/693920

With tremendous anticipation, I hooked up the new model and it absolutely sucked. It had way more features and likely used op amps vs the old discreet model. It was lifeless, had no dynamics, and didn't drive the 4 Ohm Polks worth a crap. I learned the hard way that specs were meaningless and you had to listen to determine if a component sounded better or worse. Two years later, I got a closeout deal on a Denon PMA-737 60wpc integrated (paid $200 for a $300 unit) and it just mopped the floor with the 100wpc $300 Kenwood.
I have said it before in other threads, but since this thread asks the question, I would have to say the Pass Labs X 250.5. I used it in single ended mode, which I was told later was not optimum, although I never read that in all of my pre-purchase research. I bought it and auditioned it with 5 different speakers in my system, and in each case, the sound was thin and electronic. It was a really shocking disappointment.