Has anyone else auditioned something that really was terrible?

But don’t the pros use Mogami cables? 😬

Mogami balanced/XLR interconnects are common in recording studios, not so their speaker cables. Ralph Karsten of Atma-Sphere, a  man who knows good sound, recommends the ic's for use with his electronics.

Been a few things.  VACs integrated, the early version.  We got it shipped in straight from the fairly positive Stereophile review. We assumed the best, told them it was broke and sent it back.  They replaced a resistor, a couple of caps and a tube.  Flat, no soundstage, not much for Dynamics.  While the boss is on the phone with VAC, I hook up a little Italian EL34 SE integrated and turn it up a bit.  Boss looks at me, the little amp, the phone, then sent it back.  Sonic Frontier's SF1 preamp was a complete dud.  Lifeless.  The old Onkyo M504 amp that is making a comeback in the market. Pretty much any Carver SS amp has a Sonic signature that makes me cringe.  Very bright, decent dynamics, but the bass is hollow.  Crown has that upward tilt but big bass.  Most of the newer behemoth amps anymore have become too bright and sterile.  Speakers?  Don't know where to begin. 
In spite of the bad stuff, there have been many very thoughtful designers who actually took our critiques seriously.  An importer we represented brought us two pairs of speakers with a glowing review in a Canadian magazine.  They weren't bad, just not up to the hype.  Recessed midrange and kind of muddy bass.  Amazingly, a box showed up one day from the manufacturer with a very nice letter explaining the modifications driven by our review.  The speakers were now quite good and did everything as we would expect.  Cairn did the same with an integrated with odd voicing.  Sent us the updated sample straight from the factory in France.  Got involved with a couple of phono stage projects as well. One from square one, 3 in development.  I miss the old industry. 

I would have said the GoldenEar Triton 1. I listened to them at my local dealer and it sounded like something was broken. After that experience I was convinced GE was terrible. Two months later I went to Axpona and the Triton 1’s were teamed up with Primaluna. I thought the combo at the show sounded absolutely fantastic, so I’m always a little hesitant to say a particular component was terrible because odds are I’m wrong. Now, something was wrong that day I listened at the dealer but it wasn’t the GoldenEar like I concluded.

A lot of the time when a system sounds bad it is due to an amplifier/speaker mismatch.Unfortunately many modern speakers are very badly designed from ease of drive perspective which means they are likely to sound bad with a lot of amplifiers.I was recently reading a Hi Fi News with a roundup of the best speakers for the year and they were just about all difficult loads-typically dipping down to under 3 ohms in the bass where they should be more like 5-10 ohms .Focal Sopra was one but there was even worse loads than them [Wilson for example].These are amplifier hostile speakers!Speakers like this should not be recommended by anybody.