Your single most significant purchase mistake?

My wife🤭 

@ted_denney , simple. Mark Levinson the person sold the company. I also think John Curl has had little to do with the company for decades. There are maybe a handful of audio electronics engineers as good. 

As a matter of fact, there are many pieces I regret buying even though they were learning experiences. Top of the list would be the Transcriptors Vestigial Tonearm. I would be polite calling it garbage. Here is a twist. What about equipment that everyone else thought was garbage but turned out in your experience not to be? I put the Phaselinear 700 in that category. It was not a bad amp relative to other SS amps of the day. It made Crown amps sound like ----. If you needed the power there was nowhere else to go. I tortured mine for 10 years and it never complained.

Bob Carver had his hits and misses. His ultimate line source speakers were big misses and so has been every other dynamic speaker designed that way. The Nearfield Pipe Dreams are another example. If you want line sources you have to go Planar magnetic, Ribbon or ESL.