Worst Speakers Ever??

Let me tell you about the Bass Guitar Cabinet we made with a cardboard box, fiberglass ceiling insulation and a lot of packing tape
OK for real Bose 901s my least favorite speakers, and I hate Ovation guitars too

The worst speakers I ever owned were Utah 10" 3 way speakers. They sounded nice, but With with my pioneer 424 12 wpc, they buzzed intermittently driving me nuts!. It sounded like the voice coil lead wires were touching the cone. I went through 4 pairs under warranty and gave up. Other speakers on the system were fine.

 

@pcrhkr 

 

I worked at Poling stereo (Ft Lauderdale) in the mid 70s. we sold a ton of Ultralinear speakers

I owned a pair of Ultralinar 100s back in the day. They were the best $99 / Pair speakers you could buy. They sounded great on rock and roll, BTO kicked nice. Compared side by side at the stereo store, you had to pay $500 / pair to beat them. Not a great low or high end on the UL100s. I removed the woofer out of curiosity to find a $10 woofer and $5 tweeter. The company made the most of it. I never had the case problem you experienced. They were a great starter speaker. The JBL Lancers I built way surpassed them as they should have with the $200 woofer, LE 20, LE 5 upgraded model. 1" thick particle board.

Zu Audio Cube, the shrill of Lowther Shout was simply painful. No reviewer mentioned this "feature".

Easy question to answer:  KEF LS50 speakers.  

When I had my first job in the "Electronic Sound" (yes, that actually was the name of a Grand Rapids based 'stereo' store), I brought home the McIntosh speakers to try out. I had the tangent tracking  bang olufsen turntable, some Luxman pre-amp, etc. These speakers were huge square pieces of deluxe furniture that had some drivers somewhere inside there. They sounded like your Grandpa's stereo console if you covered it with four down blankets. Warm....very warm sounding. When the burglars broke in they stole my turntable (without the European connector), but left those speakers. I could see they tried to steal them but they weighed at least 200 pounds a piece so they were left behind. Most horrible speakers I've heard to this day. No wonder I've over compensated by getting Klipsch Lascalas. Crisp, revealing, and efficient to a fault but no McIntosh thankfully! (Makes one wonder how early "stereos" experiences end up affecting future sound choices?)

I had a Sansui SP-5….something, don’t remember exact model. Weighed a ton. Beautiful cabinet made of solid wood with a lattice front. Must have had 5 or 6 drivers. Considering how wonderful my Sansui 881 & 9090DB receivers sounded, I was astounded at the utter trash sound of those speakers. I never opened them up to see what driver quality looked like, maybe it was just bad crossover execution. 

Here's a quick "making lemonade out of lemons" story:

As a teenager, I had a nice little Pioneer receiver and some small, compact speakers.  I was visiting one of those catalog stores and did my usual stroll thru the "stereo" department.  There they were!  A set of Scott 15" 3-ways on the closeout rack.  Only one problem.  Someone had thrust their fist through the woofer cone of one of them.  They were priced at some ridiculous ($40 a pair) price, so a bought them and took them home.

My sister had some clear finger nail polish that I used to adhere the fragmented and torn edges together.  It was one ugly woofer when I got finished.  I let the polish cure for a couple of hours, and fired them up.  Boom!!!  Mids, highs ... AND ... lots of bass!!

I played them until it was time to move away to college and they wouldn't fit in the truck of my '65 Corvair Corsa.  Not sure of the fate of these speakers.  But, they were perfect for a high schooler who preferred quantity over quality -- at the time.

My first store was a Team Electronics.  We had a house brand named Award that were absolute garage.  We sold a 8" 2-way for $99 a pair and paid like $8 bucks for them.  If you tapped on the top too hard, your knuckles would poke through...really, true story.  Awful speakers.

 

The worst speakers I have owned were the Radio Shack Realistic brand Nova 7’s.  I didn’t know a thing about speakers or really any audio equipment when I bought the Nova 7’s that I saw at the local RS store.  This was during the early 1970’s. The price was lower than some alternatives, and I didn’t have money.  I can say that the cabinets looked nice for the price . . not vinyl or thin particle board.  
 

The things I didn’t like about them I only realized when I heard a friend’s stereo.  The Nova’s did not project the sound out into the room, not the bass and especially not the midrange and highs.  It was like the sound was muffled.  When I bought some big Advents a couple of years later, I rarely listened to the Nova’s anymore. 

Back in the 70’s, every stereo chain had it’s house brand. They all sucked.

They pretty much got everything wrong about speaker design and build. And that was back then, when a lot less was known.

The vast majority of 70’s Japanese speakers. Too many drivers, mounted randomly in unbraced enclosures. The vintage stereo fans love these visual and sonic monstrosities.

JBL too. I used to work at a chain that carried L100’s. Even back then, it was not hard to hear they were bad. The new ones are barely better.

With regards to current speakers, Klipsch for sure is at the top of my list.

Also, almost any speaker labeled as "heritage", "classic" or similar term (KLH, Wharfdale, Harbeth..I’m looking at you) . People! Speaker designers have learned a lot in the last 5 decades. There are real sonic reasons why speakers have gotten away from "monkey coffin" enclosures, with wide baffles, and that stupid lip around the outer edge of the baffle.

I am not saying that some of these don’t sound good, but that does not mean they haven't been sonically compromised, on the alter of nostalgia.

While most house brand and white van speakers back in the day were uniformly hideous, the most disappointing speakers I was ever around were the JBL L-36, a 10" 3-way positioned as the little brother to the L-100. I worked in an Advent/ADS/Dahlquist/JBL shop in the mid-70s. We had a pretty good showroom with a 16-pair Advent level-compensated speaker comparator, so when you A/B'd speakers they were at the same level. It inserted a pad between pre and power amps that was adjusted for each pair using a pink noise generator so what you heard was the actual difference in speaker sound quality, not loudness. Very revealing. Anyway, we could never get the L-36 to sound better than awful, no matter how or where we positioned them. Unbalanced, harsh, the bass fell off about 60Hz. Just a beautifully built but terrible sounding loudspeaker. In 2 years, we only sold one pair, and they were returned in exchange for a pair of Large Advents. The costumers wife refused to be in the room when the L-36s were playing.

Bertagni look interesting but don't sound good. I have the SM-100's bought for $25 at Goodwill. No cabinets - a rectangular piece of Styrofoam with the bass and treble motors sunk into the foam. I only tried them briefly. Maybe they will sound better with my SET 45 amp?

Good marketing can get people to buy anything.

Marketing 101: You don't sell the steak, you sell the sizzle...

I see many mentions of klipsch in this thread. I just smile and nod as I bask in the goodness of my LaScala IIs.

 

 

I once sold a pair of $250 speakers (for the PC) on eBay because I thought they sounded awful. I got a ticked-off reply from the guy who bought them after he saw my bad review on Amazon from the week earlier. 😅

@1971gto455ho 

oh gawd, IIRC they were low end Rs10? Bookshelves. My eyes (and ears) weren’t opened until I got into my 1st Apogee Acoustic and Vandersteens.

@jl1ny 
I gather your referencing late model Harmon infinity era, perhaps a bad experience with lower end models. Easy research reveals many highly acclaimed models that still hold a candle too much that’s available today. I’ve had the pleasure of working with several to restore high end older then move out their high end newer. Most won’t hear IRS V ‘s or well set up Beta’s, Epsilon’s, many have or own and the journey stops there. I’ve ‘had’  B&W…lol 

How about the most honest crap speaker?  Back in the late 60s and 70s Infinity was getting a name for itself with things like the Servo Statik 1.  But they also sold a lot through the large chain Tech Hi-Fi, who wanted some cheap speakers with a good name on them.  So Infinity came out in 1976 with a two way speaker with 10" woofer and 2" tweeter and a very simple crossover only hooked to the tweeter in a cheap box.  Really a garbage speaker both construction wise and musically (one of the smallest woofer magnets I have ever seen, a KEF B110 midrange had a significantly bigger magnet).  

The name?  The POS 1!  And, yes, the initials stand for exactly what you would think they do, with Infinity admitting and everyone in the industry knowing they were a Piece Of....

Back on the olden days at Tech Hifi the only bad speakers to me were always the CerwinVegas. All muddy bass and not much else.

B&W (Infinity), Polk, JBL, Klipsch, Cerwin Vega…ahh the cringeworthy memories!

edited: Infinity not b&w

I'm embarrassed to say I owned 2 of the dishonorable mentions here.

My first set of speakers were Panasonic Thrusters. They came with an all-in-one system that was a stretch Christmas gift from my parents back then.

I bought my Mach Ones with money I saved mowing lawns and doing odd jobs. I remember saving up and them selling at $259.95 a pair. I had to wait a couple weeks for them to go on sale for $239.95 to buy. It was winter,  and my job stream had dried up for the season. 

I had those for decades. They ended up as garage speakers, eventually. Once I saw the foam surrounds were disintegrated, i trashed them. 

I should have re-foamed them so they could rock on!

 

Worked briefly for a repair shop during college. They sold garbage "Hi-Fis." The speakers were about 16 × 10 and 6 inches deep. You could see hints of the chrome surround of the 8" woofer and the separate tweeter behind the fixed in place covers.  Turns out they were only painted on and the only driver was a cheapo 4" radio speaker. 

Nothing beats the dominator!

 

Worst speaker ive ever owned was a pair named CANNON... i was sold at  STEREO WAREHOUSE on LI...They were billed as a sister co to ESS!....They had a passive radiator on back and a rectangular  tweeter with a metal screen over it...Once i got em home they were very shrilly sounding bright...i xchanged em for  EPI 180s...Great move!.....Best speakers to buy for refurb would be an EPI or an AR 18....Very simple crossovers and on the AR with a vinyl veneer,you heat gun it and pull right off...replace with a nice wood veneer..Cherry looks great..refoams easy as well..ive done dozens...

I like my Raven C Talons 😎

Just have one word.... BOSE

Hey man do you want to buy some big speakers for $200?

The ones you buy from two guys in a van that stopped me in the parking lot? I live in a large metro area ,and these guys stopped me 3 or 4 times. I wonder if it was a national marketing scam.

Thankfully I didn't fall for this.

On my list Talon is the worst speaker on nearly all models.

Traded Sonus Faber anything for Moab? I’m guessing you wanted to get some $$ in your pocket or you didn’t have a quality system that would make the Sonus Faber sing. 
As for the worst for the money: magnepan 30.7, heard them 2x when they were on tour, terrible sound. Any bose, cerwin Vega, klh, any newer Klipsch, and others. 
I also owned the ESS speakers with the heil air motion tweeter/midrange in the late 70’s. I thought this tweeter/midrange where the best at the time and the newer versions/copies of the heil amt are very good.

i bought a pair of the largest Acoustiphase speakers as a jr in HS back in 1975! Remember them? They made the world's largest speaker!!!!! They were JBL100 knockoffs and there sound was similiar but not as dynamic or good. i got rid of them for a pair of JBLs!!!

Anything by Audio Note

The first time I heard stereo reasonably positioned was in my loft through the bands Altec A7’s. A friend loaned his Fisher receiver and Benjamin Miracord / Shure for a few days before a party. That was the hook!

I replaced the A7’s with much smaller Cerwin-Vega’s PA speakers an A-1800 SS amp and a B36 horn. Beat the hell out of that stuff for years without a problem. Even though It hasn’t been out of the house in decades I found a proper kit and had the Vega 187 driver in my acoustic 361 reconed.

I can’t speak to Gene Czerwinski's home speakers but I know why I’ve got a bit of tinnitus today.

Not long after that party I lost the loft and except for gigs the A7’s lived in the Econo Line. In hindsight all of the speakers I selected until the mid nineties were crap. Along with my Stereo Review subscription I didn’t really know what I was doing anyway.

Oh man you brought back some memories…..

My first “real” stereo system I ever got, was for my Christmas present back in December of 1978.

My father bought me (from Tech Hi-Fi) a Marantz SR 2000 receiver, a BIC belt drive turntable, and a pair of “12”, 3 way Ultralinear speakers”. The woofers looked light blue in color (teal?) with paper midrange and paper tweeter. I thought they were the “crap” back in the day. But I was only 15 years old at the time. lol

."JBL speakers are probably what most classic rock songs of the 70 and 80s were recorded on. They are not up for criticism only you are if you don't appreciate them"

Because the recording engineers of the 70's and 80's had such golden ears. Right...

Way back in the early 70’s for a few months I was a Radio Shack Manager (my age was 18)

I remember we had a speaker that was called the MC 500. It sold for $50 bucks. The store paid about $12 bucks for them from Tandy Corp.

Frequently we would have a Midnight Madness Sale. The speakers were marketed as 50% off selling for about $25 bucks. But the store still made a 100% profit!

I wonder if speaker mark ups are the same today?

ozzy

You have to spend serious money to get a really bad speaker. The worst speakers are the ones that cost a fortune and sound terrible. My two favorites are the Hill Plasmatronics and the Nearfield Pipe Dreams. 

@garebear They are junk when brand new!

@prof 1+ on every Mac speaker. Nicely made Tektons. 

Hi again bdp24. It turns out one of the speakers we also had at Wall to Wall Sound was the original ESS Heil speakers. They were ok(small letters). And we had one set of vinyl Dynaco A25 speakers on sale for $52/pair(They were just there for bait and switch. we weren't supposed to sell them). The A25s were a way better speaker than the ESS Heils and also the original LBL 100s we also sold. 

I suspect part of any speakers possible right acoustic design could be a complex and tuned porthole inside the speakers or outside.

Most design of speakers had only a simple porthole, a hole...Period.

I suspect that it is a question of cost and profit...

 

There is no comparison at all between any speaker with a simplistic porthole and a complex tuned porthole...

I know because i made one ... 😊

Then for me all speakers with a simple porthole , nevermind their price, lack behind their true potential.... For cost and profit reason...

Designing a complex porthole inside as a labyrinth for sure may cost more ...But could be way better ...

Anyway i will buy my next speaker low cost one with one porthole i will redesign as the one i own...

The difference is staggering ...before and after ....

I say it for people who know that acoustics matter more in audio than price tag... Even for speakers...

 

 

The same is true for the headphone shell. I know because i modified one with internal tuned resonators. All other headphone are like trash compared to it ...

Speakers, (headphone, pipes organ in a church also ), they are all Helmholtz resonators... But many company sell them as drivers with crossover in a box for cost management reason or esthetic(my porthole external design is not esthetic 😊)

Acoustics rules audio ... 😊

 

 

@bdp24

Thanks for the history lesson on the ESS/Heil relationship. The very first "real" high fidelity system I ever heard was a Mac/AMT1 system. Literally rocked my world!!

Lots of good references here on ’hits and misses" by brands/models that genuinely thought they had something special to offer at the time, but failed to deliver sonically. Some had good (or even great) commercial success and are still highly desirable today by those who align themselves to the brand/model sonically, emotionally -- or both. Then, as @phusis pointed out, there were hidden gems that were underappreciated at the time, yet still have a loyal following today.

Great posts!!

The worst "high end" speakers I've ever personally heard are:

Every McIntosh Speaker I've ever heard - the ones with the multi tweeters.  Just bland, awful sound and a lot of it.

Some big expensive NEAT speakers a local dealer demoed for me.  He'd given up the Kudos brand for NEAT.  I didn't have the heart to tell him just what. mistake he'd made. 

Some long ago Talon Khorus stand mounted speakers.  So bad I thought they were broken.

Klipsch speakers are consistently so awful, except for a couple of relatively recent models (one went active) that got redeemed or whatever.

Overall, the Klipsclowns seem to have no idea about speaker design. But, they infest every house through bestbuy with their cheap sht and train the young listener’s ears on their crappy sound. Thereafter, he is zombified, he will no longer be able to recognize anything good and will keep looking for that crappy sound.

Boy this thread kindled some old memories.

Back in the 70's I worked as an tech in the service department for a small chain of stereo stores. One of the speaker lines that the carried was Ultralinear. As mentioned, these speaker were cheap but there were HUGE profit margins in selling them.

However, in an effort to come up with a "better, cheaper" product, the sales manager and a few of his half wit sales people came up to service department toward the end of the day and requisitioned a variety of cross over capacitors and a couple sets of alligator clips. Curious to see what they were doing,  another tech and I went to check on them when we finished our day.

We found them in a basement stock room with an assortment of woofers, mids and tweeters, an empty Ultralinear speaker cabinet. They were trying various combinations of drivers and crossover caps in the cabinet. They would screw them in, hook it up to a receiver, play it for a bit, and then try something else. To say they were clueless is a total understatement.

They had no idea of crossover frequency/ capacitor value, they just knew there were some of those in the speaker they opened up and figured they needed some in their design. 

The other tech and I stood by and watched the circus for probably about 30 minutes when we had seen enough and left. We got a pretty good laugh out of it.

I don't think their "speaker designing" ever came to fruition because not much was said after their session, and the caps and alligator clips were returned to the service department the next day.

Building speakers back in the day was pretty common place. Does anyone remember a mail order place, I think it was Speaker Works. They sold raw drivers, crossover and plans for cabinets for 2-way to 5 way speaker systems.

 

@dynamiclinerarity: In the mid-80’s I saw a pair of the ESS Transtatic I’s for sale in The Recycler (a weekly For Sale newspaper in SoCal), $400 for the pair. One of the B139 woofers had been replaced with an imitation (the oval frame and flat-faced cone), but other than that were fine. I bought ’em and called ESS to get another B139; they had one and only one left! I still have the speakers, a remnant of my youth. 😊

By the way, fans of hi-fi history: The Reason ESS ended up making the Heil Air-Motion Transformer loudspeakers in the 1970’s was precisely because of the Transtatic I. Oscar Heil had a working prototype of his tweeter, and wanted to mate it with the KEF B139 woofer, considered State-Of-The-Art at the time (David Wilson used it as the mid-woofer in his original WAMM). Heil went into the ESS dealer in San Jose---TV-Audio Center on West San Carlos Blvd. (my hi-fi shop at the time), as he had seen the B139 in a pair of Transtatics. They hooked him up with ESS, and the rest is history.

Too bad ESS didn’t go with Heil’s idea of using the B139; the woofer (and it’s enclosure) used in the AMT-1 was not up to the task. But I’m sure the B139 would have driven the price of the AMT-1 above their target retail price, $299/ea iirc. ESS sold a lot of them anyway.

 

botrytis,

I still have the Radio Shack Mach 1’s. But, I replaced all the interior wiring, changed the midrange and the tweeters along with a new crossover and 5-way speaker binding posts.

Re-braced and sealed the cabinet and now I use it in my pool table area. Actually, doesn’t sound bad.

ozzy

To me the darling of the vintage set, RS Mach 1's were the worst.

……Tektron Moab’s now there’s junk in about 2 years ! 

So much hate for JBL! I still have my college L-166 and they sound great with the right kind of music - Bob Seger howling or David Lee Roth screeching sounds awesome!! 😂😂

like many others my vote goes to the Bose 901. I bought into all the hype and couldn’t wait to hear them. When I did, I was so disappointed. But I learned an important lesson at that point, don’t believe what others are saying, especially the marketers, make decisions with your own ears.