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Is there any bad sounding high-end gear--?

I was reading the thread here today about biased reviewers-
it got me thinking, out of the stuff which is reviewed in the publications which serve the high-end arena, is there really any bad sounding gear?----I am talking about from what I call the golden era of High-end, 1990---2000, stuff from the major players like ARC, CJ, Krell, MLevinson, Jadis---etc-----I use this time frame as this was the pre-Chinese era when most gear was from the US, we also saw stuff from Italy, France and Swiss made stuff.

When I have purchased something and not liked it, I always struck it up to a system mismatch----

If anyone can provide what they bought and really thought it was terrible, I'd be interested to know what it was.
128x128justlisten
chadnliz
3,736 posts
 
"Just because it is billed as HIGH END does not mean it sounds that way."
But thats one HUGE problem, who defines what is "High End" and does "High End" even have a sound (ofcourse it does) but if 10 people have 10 different opinions who is right and if one of them says its not at all high end is he wrong or are the other 9 all wrong?
rok2id's avatar
rok2id
7,823 posts
 
the answer to most questions on this site is P.T. Barnum!!
srt6
7 posts
 
I would have to say..that in my early audio days..Carver stuff was just plain BAD. also possibly the worst speaker i have ever heard was Bose 901...Yuck
mrtennis
3,295 posts
 
it is obvious that any product designed by imperfect human beings can perform poorly in some respect. consider expensive cars. some are not mechanically or electrically reliable.

regardless of the definition of "high end" and regardless of the definition of "good" sound there will always be products that disappoint. period.
singleendedsingle
664 posts
 
I remeber the Onkyo M 504. It doesn't have soundstage! sq was awful.
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