The Worst Speaker you have ever heard.

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.

for the more expensive line the B&W and SOnus FAber
they both have a nasty peak in the mids the B&w more so
around the 5-6k range ,My freind had the 801 untill last new year inner detail was a little indistinct
for single driver units the Zu druid are a little fuzzy in the inner detail compared with the a Dynaudio ,or A ZEN ADagio in a conventional speaker.

Anything by Wilson Audio. Dry as a desert. They leave me cold every time. I listened to Wilson Watt fives at one time and was totally unimpressed. In the same room they had a pair of slightly used Dunlavy SC-1's. (Their entry level speaker.) The Dunlavys sounded better in every way. I bought them that day. $700 the pair and they were far more musical than the $15,000 Wilsons. I have never heard a Wilson speaker that I like. I have heard many speakers in the $1,500 to $2,000 a pair range that are far better.

Anything by Wilson Audio. Dry as a desert. They leave me cold every time.

I've heard exactly 1 pair of Wilsons at a friend's house, WP 8s driven by Pass Labs. Absolutely beautiful sounding system, worth the price I suppose if you have the money.
And I'm a SET / Hi eff guy, so it's not like I lean towards dry and analytical.

Well, the worst ones in a home stereo system are almost always the real crappy cheap ones that have come in compact stereo systems from the likes of Aiwa, TEchnics, Soundesign, Sanyo, Panasonic, Sony, Fisher, and the others for years that are cheap and mass produced.

The worst ones I have heard that were very expensive and should have sounded good were Peak Consults at Sound By Singer in NYC a few years back. All bass high end, no midrange. Something must have been wrong with the setup somewhere, yet this mega buck system was demoed as if normal. I've never heard Peak Consults otherwise so hard to say for sure. Maybe it was fine and there is someone out there that would take to the flavor of the sound, which admittedly was quite different from most anything else I have ever heard.

I've also heard some large Sonus Fabers sound really bad run off Krell amps in an old shop in Paramus NJ a few years back, but I know that was an aberration in that I have heard the same SFs sound very nice elsewhere set up right.