Is there any bad sounding high-end gear--?


I was reading the thread here today about biased reviewers-
it got me thinking, out of the stuff which is reviewed in the publications which serve the high-end arena, is there really any bad sounding gear?----I am talking about from what I call the golden era of High-end, 1990---2000, stuff from the major players like ARC, CJ, Krell, MLevinson, Jadis---etc-----I use this time frame as this was the pre-Chinese era when most gear was from the US, we also saw stuff from Italy, France and Swiss made stuff.

When I have purchased something and not liked it, I always struck it up to a system mismatch----

If anyone can provide what they bought and really thought it was terrible, I'd be interested to know what it was.
128x128justlisten
I would have to say..that in my early audio days..Carver stuff was just plain BAD. also possibly the worst speaker i have ever heard was Bose 901...Yuck
it is obvious that any product designed by imperfect human beings can perform poorly in some respect. consider expensive cars. some are not mechanically or electrically reliable.

regardless of the definition of "high end" and regardless of the definition of "good" sound there will always be products that disappoint. period.
Hate to join the Krell "bashwagon" but the S300i sounds more like a Black&Decker power tool then a Steinway.