2. amps-preamps
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Your most disappointing purchase or audition?

I've had a few.

bought a Naim Nait 3. Loved it in the store. Returned it within a week- way forward at home

Brought home some CJ preamp to audition perhaps 22 years ago. Noisy as anything and a turn off transient destroyed a tweeter (though years later i bought a CJ 17LS2 which I thought was the finest preamp I ever heard in my home)

Auditioned a VPI table (HW19) in a store- the store just could not get the belt to stay on. Bought a Rega instead. This was in perhaps 1990.

Fortunately, I never really experienced buyers remorse say 6 months or more after settling on a piece of gear.

Finally, there have been too many speakers that got stellar write ups which I just didn't care for.
zavato

Showing 2 responses by jafox

jafox
1,475 posts
 
Very tired of the Atma-sphere issue here so I will contribute to the theme of this thread.

Major disappointments for me? Thiel 3.6 and 2.3 speakers!!! These were way too analytical to me. Replacing these with Talon Khorus and Talon Peregrine were major improvements across the board. Sadly the pricing game with Talons gave the company a bad reputation. But these speakers are awesome nevertheless for both music and HT systems.

Another was the Audio Research PH3. Way overrated. The PH2 that I had been using for 10 years was vastly more smooth and tonally coherent than the bright and severely colored PH3.

Oh and finally, the Audioquest Diamond ICs. Wow, what a horribly dimensionally flat cable this was! I admit to using the highly tonally colored NBS Statement ICs at the time, but at least these provided the spatial features within the music.
jafox
1,475 posts
 
Ok one more time….I actually forgot…the MOST disappointing product I owned of all time: and the envelope please……..da daaaaaaaaaa………. the Audio Research Classic 150 amplifiers.

Having owned the ARC VT130 amp driving Magnepan 3.3's, this combination was absolute heaven. Major wrong decision to trade the VT130 + cash for the CL150s as these stupid amps always shut down with the Maggies and that magical decay and harmonic richness was dramatically reduced. And these crappy things got major hyped up by the reviewers. Dumping these and going with a lowly Counterpoint NPS 400 at half the cost and far more significant performance was great. I still use this amp as a backup and it works very well with the SoundLabs A1 speakers.
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