Has anyone else auditioned something that really was terrible?

I wouldn't say terrible, but I simply didn't enjoy the sound of some Paradigm 5Fs I listened to at the local shop a while back. It just sounded harsh. Source and amplification were McIntosh. I simply wasn't impressed for the price. The B&W I tried next were more to my liking.

Auditioning for "pirates..." counts on any of my worst lists, even bicycles.

I demoed some bookshelf Martin Logans at Magnolia in Atlanta and thought they were terribly directional and lacked power all around. The entry B&W’s they had sounded much better though not my taste either. 
Also heard a pair of DynAudio specials as previous reviewer and the seller at a specialty store here in ATL raved about but I thought the Monitor Audio Silver bookshelves sounded better for a fraction of the price playing the same track. Couldn’t believe it!

i gambled on a pair of Sonus Faber Principias without hearing prior acquired through here and have been an excellent value. 

I was auditioning $2k floor standing speakers recently. Two speakers that stood out as being surprisingly not good were the B&W 603 and the Goldenear Audio Triton Five.  I've seen good reviews for both but how they sounded seemed nothing like what was said about them in reviews. Maybe their sound signatures don't fit my preference? I got a pair of Monitor Audio Silver 300s which do seem to be a great value at $2k. My notes on both:

Bowers & Wilkins 603: These speakers were a bit of mess. Their sound seems to be the result in trying to design a speaker that can play lower in the low end and higher in the high end without sorting out the fundamentals of how to play music first. Kind of boring to listen to since it fails to reproduce so much of the music captured in recordings and fails to play rhythms well.

Goldenear Triton 5: These were impressive sounding speakers with a lot of "presence" but I determined pretty quickly that they weren't for me. The breadth of the image they put out was wide but not well focused. The low end was full and powerful. Where they fell short for me was that their sound was a bit aggressive and pretty quickly fatiguing for me. Also the low end was a bit loose sounding and tended to overshadow the mid range and the highs.

Michael Green Revolution series speakers.

They were actively bad.