A couple of weeks ago, I was installing pair of Super Zeros to a smaller system that is in a fairly large room. The speakers have binding posts that face downward at a slight angle, which is off the beaten path to start with. When I turned the system on, the sound seemed OK at first, but then I noticed something just didn't sound quite right. The system itself (amp/preamp/tuner/CD) was an amalgam of a couple of new pieces and one piece from a behemoth setup that I was downsizing.
I wasn't sure where to begin on solving the poor sound issue, but decided to start with the basics, which in my book is checking the connections to the speakers. Turned out that the binding posts on the Zeros are oriented exactly opposite of most speakers - looking at them from the rear, the right channel is on the left and the left on the right. I had wired both speakers out of phase, which was easy to do because I had been working in low-light conditions when hooking them up, and the right-channel binding post is a dark red that can look almost black under those circumstances. I felt kind of dumb for making such a rookie mistake, but gratified that I had solved the problem so quickly. Things like this happen when Harry Truman was still president when you were born.