Has anyone else auditioned something that really was terrible?

Well... I lusted after the original Revel Ultima Salon’s for years - highly reviewed and rated as A+ . Heard them many times at dealers and shows and dismissed the dull sound as associated equipment or room. Finally against what my ears were telling me I purchased my Salon’s... three amps, four pre-amps, and two different rooms later I sold them.

I do have a friend that own’s a pair plus the new Salon2’s as well and likes them very much. So hold your flames, clearly my ears are broken hence the name tinear123

I dropped by a local audio boutique a few years ago and they were demonstrating the then-new Wilson Duette stand-mount speakers. I don't remember the electronics they were connected to, but they were decent, but the sound was bad - flat and no decent treble. Then I looked closer and saw that the source material was from a laptop computer. I think they were using the audio straight out of the laptop's sound card, though I can't be sure. To be fair, it may have belonged to a customer who brought it in for a demo, but it did the Wilsons no favors.

How is GoldenEar not on this list like 5 times already? I have never heard something so well-reviewed that sounded so bland and with such poor imaging. We were a dealer for them temporarily, but couldn't sell them with a good conscience.

The other one is the Raidho D-1. We transported a set for a client from one house to another about 5 years ago and they sounded so bad I thought we may have damaged the tweeters. Seriously. We brought them back to the office and played them on 3 different systems for multiple employees and everyone agreed they just sounded bad. The B&W 805D absolutely crushed them above 80Hz. We even sneaked the 805D into the client's house while he was away and played them on the Zanden gear he had and the B&W was still way better. We told him we were concerned about the Raidhos which is why we brought them to our office to be checked out, but we couldn't find anything physically or electrically wrong with either one.
We never tried to sell the client on the B&W because we didn't want it to look like we were poo-pooing his gear. We just reconnected his D-1s and he said they sounded as they should. We were all shocked.

I auditioned for "Pirates of Penzance" once.  Does that count?

Schiit Audio Magni. 

Granted, this is only a $99 headphone amp, but how in the world can they sell it? Hard to describe actually, but it produced some really strange digital to analog conversion. Maybe I had a flawed unit, but I returned it the very next day.