The Worst Speaker you have ever heard.

At least Al can pronounce the word "nuclear"...(Hey Peter,is it Olympics time again already? Seriously though, Shrub is a highly, umm, entertaining speaker - wouldn't trade him for a real president unless the going got tough...oops... ;^)

The worst $$K speaker I've ever personally encountered from a 'major' manufacturer came from Velodyne, of all companies. When I was selling audio retail about 10 years back, they introduced a small monitor - which was their first (and I believe last!) attempt at this market - with very dense cabinetry, beautifully-made, and metal-diaphragmed drivers in a D'Appolito configuration, which supposedly incorporated some kind of 'revolutionary' technology that time (or at least myself) has forgotten. I don't recall the model name, but these babies were given a big promotional push, with a rep coming out to the stores to demo them and give background for salespeople, with literature, display cards, etc. I seem to remember them selling for around $3.5K, a lot at the time for their size (sorry if any of my 'factual' recollections are off-base). Anyway, these things were just the biggest stinkers - the most closed-in, uptight, totally dead-sounding music killers - any other speakers in the shop did better, regardless of price. Needless to say, none were sold, and I think after about a year they quietly disappeared from the market - certainly from our store (though their subs stayed). This speaker, whatever it was, isn't even listed on Velodyne's website under their model history. Anybody know more 'bout this fiasco, or remember the model name/number?...

Wow, hard to believe someone pulled a comment of mine from '03 to remark upon today. Leeistad, my guess is that the reason Velodyne didn't succeed (in either sense, businesswise or sonically) with their speaker back in the mid-90's wasn't simply because they make subs per se, but because this was their ambitious first attempt at making a satellite speaker. More than one company hasn't succeeded with their first product in a category as well as they did farther down the road. Of course, Velodyne it seems subsequently decided not to proceed any farther down that particular road, so their failure is what I tend to remember (since I was supposed to be trying to actually sell these things at the time).

Moving from the specific to the general for a moment, let me throw this out there: It occurs to me, after reading the recent responses above, that the high-end nominees fall mainly into two catagories: Those with limited bandwidth, limited dynamic range, nonlinear tonal balance, and/or relatively high levels of harmonic distortion; and -- somewhat ironically -- those with wide bandwidth, wide dynamic range, relatively neutral tonal balance, and/or low levels of harmonic distortion.