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
As far as I can figure, he's making it up, its certainly not anything in warranty.

Per my Atmasphere equipment. I was young and naive, assumed there was a common goal to make those purchased-new products work properly. After more than a yr of efforts at repairs I realized my goal differed from others.

Even our first amps and preamps were designed to be easy to service; this was because I worked in a number of consumer electronics repair operations while putting myself through engineering school.

Since we never wired a single amp with stranded wire (unless it was supplied by the customer; before we got our own custom wire made, we had a jig that allowed us to strip a solid core wire from coax cable), I am very confident that Tubes story is 100% made up. He has some form of agenda that has nothing to do with audio. Either that or he has totally confused us with someone else.
Tubes108,
You've owned Viva, Quicksilver and Joule power amplifiers (good taste) did you have any reliability problems with these?
Charles,
Ralph, I believe you, you exsposed the circumstances, this is good you looked into this, I have had similiar problems as Tubes108, However, Mine was very real, and I had to force a complete refund for the componet, very nasty deal,took 3 to 4 months of arguing and a lawyer! hope I never go through that again in my life!
I've never bought anything that really sucked sonically.. I've had a Creek Destiny that just blew out a channel and getting it repaired was a 4 month nightmare. I also have a W4S Dac 1 that recently had a channel just crap out.. That sort of pissed me off since I missed the warranty by a few months and in the interim W4S increase their warranty from 3 to 5 years but wouldn't cover my very rare failure under the new warranty terms since when I bought mine it was three years.. I think they should have done it as good will, but oh well..
I agree, only because they extended the warranty anyway, you would think at these prices, High- end Audio would be more reliable!, In the 90s, this was alot less of an issue!