The worst piece of HiFi Equipment you've ever owned?

This reminds me ...over the years I have had maybe 4 Kenwood receivers...all ok. But one really I needed to replace the remote---blue colored membrane thing that was difficult to use..and as I recall even relied on some sort of wrist movement to work it properly. It was a disaster. Oh another had a huger rectangular angled remote with a click jog wheel and fancy display. Ultra programmable...but yeah a bit complex. Kenwood's remotes could be a "chore"!!

Well folks, for whatever reason, with the exception of my first receiver(a blown up used Kenwood that I bought in 1974 from the original owner for $ 40.00, that the local hole in the wall service shop couldn`t seem to repair properly while I was teaching myself electronics repair......

Kind regards, OKB
 
My hall of fame stinkers:
Worst sounding (non PC) speakers I ever owned:
SONY SS-5050:
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They did bass ok, but the midrange and high end was horrible. I bought them when my front speakers died, and my neighbor decided to buy new speakers, but after I heard them (They were in the original boxes and barely used after they were bought at an AFB BX in Japan) they replaced my former rear surrounds, Realistic MC-1000's, which sounded much better. The level controls did tame them to some extent, but wow, they sounded bad. The cabinets were very nice. I replaced them with ADS L-730's which I really liked after I hit my second Keno ticket in '79. The Sony's went to another neighbor who loved them.
Worst AV Receiver: Another Sony, a 2005 lower end model. I don't remember the model number, but it kept going into protection mode when anything more than low volume was playing. It was soon replaced by a keeper, a Yamaha RX-V659. Worked fine for the friend I sold it to. I guess it liked the speakers he had better.
Worst 2 channel receiver: My first "good one", an HK 330B that sounded terrible. It went to HK service and came back sounding fine, about SIX months later. By then it was replaced.
Worst turntable, also my first "good one", a BSR 510? Had major rumble and it was very easy to make the stylus jump by just walking past the table it was on, and the dog would bark and it would come out the speakers! Replaced with Dual 1229 and Shure V15 Type III.
Worst cassette deck. Never had a bad one. The three I had, 2 Technics and an Onkyo lasted forever!. Two of them, the newer Technics (1980) and Onkyo (1982) are still going strong. The first Technics had a capstan motor fail at about 30 years and just after I decided to part it out, a new one appeared on Ebay, too late. I bought another one on ebay about 2003 and it's still working great.
 
Fisher KX-200 dark & muddy even when rebuilt.

Bought new Pioneer CS700 speakers only sounded good when outside and cranked.

Bought new Kenwood KA-8006. An amp that can make Dahlquist DQ-12's sound bad. My first NAD receiver showed just how bad it was.

And some big ass chinese amp that sounded like ass. Oh yeah Yaqin MC100B. Bought new and never made it to rotation. Sold it off quick.

JBL Decade 26's large rectangular ice picks. Well their big for ice picks. Proves you don't have to have horns to be strident.
 
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Wow, old thread.

AR Integrated amplifier. Sounded fine at higher levels, but low level resolution was absent. I purchased after a glowing review from Julian Hirsch and liked the cosmetics. I had it measured at a McIntosh clinic and it performed to spec. I kept it for only a year.

It was, however, a great learning experience. The diametric opposite situation was a Threshold Stasis 3 that resolved beautifully all the way down to the floor at the lowest levels. It operated class A at lower power levels while the AR ran mostly class B. I kept it for more than thirty years. :)
 
ACA Pass v1.6 amp kit from the DiyAudio scammers. 3rd rate components, psychotic CS and TS, and 3 times overpriced. One of the worst sounding and reliable amps ever.
 
This is a fun thread to read. Worst of the worst.. lets see here..

BSR turntable definitely on the top of the list. Dont remember the model.. My brother had it. Worst POS ever. Would skip if you looked at it too hard. Noisy. Just like the one hemiram spoke of above.

Yamaha K-540 cassette deck. The first one I had was in the shop 3 times for not working. Great sounding unit when it was working. The shop told me it was "filthy dirty" when it had been inside a cabinet with a glass door its entire life.. which was about a year. Later at the 4th time in the shop they said the entire transport needed to be replaced. That was it. A few years ago I recreated my old 80's system, and currently have 2 K-540's which work fine, so it was just a bad one.

Realistic SA-102. A small integrated amp. Like 5.5 watts per channel. That one is what we call a certified POS. I still have it too, just to remind me. Blew up after 6 months and sent back to RS. They repaired it, and the last time I turned it on it still worked. Such as it is. But man. Its bad bad bad. Ditto for the matching tuner that I got at a flea market for $10. Very bad.

Monster Cable power conditioner. HTS-5000. I thought this would look cool with some Carver equipment I had back then. Bought brand new. 1st unit.. bad out of the box. No power. No sign of life. Took it back. Got a minor brow beating. "Are you sure you got it hooked up right?" Got another brand new one. Bad out of the box. Worked but the meter was broke. Took it back and gave them a brow beating. That was the last piece of Monster I owned except for some speaker wire. Hard to mess that up.

Not true for Monster's interconnects. They can and did mess those up. Add them to the list. They always looked great, but I chased gremlins through every system I ever had them in until I finally threw them away. Plus the ends on those things took such a bite on RCA jacks they would pull the casing right off.. and on most mid level equipment that is not at all a good thing. Ruined lots of RCA's on Carvers with those ^$#@ things.

Could add some Carver to that list but I will save that rant for later lol
 
Could add some Carver to that list but I will save that rant for later lol
I blew an M-400a to smithereens once. Not sure how it happened, but those stupid speaker terminals on the back were pretty cheap, and the wires worked themselves out a little and shorted out. They fixed it under warranty, but the dealer told me they'd rather not see me bring that amp in ever again. :D (Some of the transistors were so toasted that the only thing remaining of them were three leads sticking out of the circuit board!)

The Realistic cassette deck I had was also a bit of a turd. I think the piece d' resistance was when the deck would auto-stop and the buttons would fly off and sail across the room. If anything, it brought some adventure to the whole listening experience!
 
My buddy's parents moved from a console stereo to a very similar 80s Fisher rack system. Definitely was nowhere near the quality of the old days! I can't say it was truly bad, but even the Radio Shack crap I owned at the time was a little bit better...
 
Pioneer VSX-522K Fragged the finals just after warranty period expired. Oppo 981 HD Power supply failure after
the company announced no longer supporting their non BluRay players. Recapped them but the displays are now
unobtanium. OSD is the only thing I can use to play them now. The worst vintage would have to be the Numark
twin CD player, Not very durable for home or pro use.
 
I had a Technics DAT player, purchased as a floor model from a local department store. It had dropouts continuously. I sent it to Technics who fixed it up properly, and I found it was much better at tape handling than the crap-ass Sony DTC-670 I owned. But for some reason, I sold the Technics over the Sony...and now the Sony sits dead in the basement, having gone bad just because it sat unused. (WTF, Sony...) I sold the Technics to someone who used to write for Audio magazine (who also made his own live recordings); he later told me it failed for him as well and was rather nonchalant about it--he says he should have expected it, being a consumer deck. Crisis averted. :D
 
Just helped a friend set up a set of Bose 901's. He seems happy, but I can now declare that Im not a fan. Their lack of frequency depth is pitiful. Ludicrous idea, all those full range drivers.

I had an old quad Lafayette receiver. They did well at designing quad circuts compared to others of that time (which isnt saying much really) but everything else about it was overrated and cheap sounding.
 
I had an old quad Lafayette receiver. They did well at designing quad circuts compared to others of that time (which isnt saying much really) but everything else about it was overrated and cheap sounding.
At that point in their life-cycle (quad receivers), they weren't designing anything. All their hi-fi features and functions came from the minds of other manufacturers.
 
At that point in their life-cycle (quad receivers), they weren't designing anything. All their hi-fi features and functions came from the minds of other manufacturers.

I find that hard to believe. To this day the Lafayette Sq-w is regarded as one of the best quadraphonic decoders of its time. There was a considerable struggle among top manufacturers like Sansui and Sony to produce such circuitry. And quad sound as badly as it failed did come a long way in a short time. The earliest versions were terrible, but some of the later ones actually did their job pretty well.
 
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I find that hard to believe. To this day the Lafayette Sq-w is regarded as one of the best quadraphonic decoders of its time. There was a considerable struggle among top manufacturers like Sansui and Sony to produce such circuitry. And quad sound as badly as it failed did come a long way in a short time. The earliest versions were terrible, but some of the later ones actually did their job pretty well.
I had an SQ-W and it was the best decoder, and composer from two channel to four of any I experienced, including the very good and highly rated last generation Sansui. I'd still have it except it developed a problem that effected any signal passing through it wit a grainy sound. I was a working technician with full access to service information and was at a complete loss as to what was wrong. That thing was packed with parts... a million diodes, ect., and I shotgunned a few areas but to me it became hopeless, and I never give up, but with this I did, so I 'got rid of it'. When it worked though, and it did for years, it was great with well thought out features.
 
A JVC QL-F4. I could never get it sounding right, took it back to the repair shop where I bought it again and again just to hear "No, it's fine, the problem is your ear."

Always sounded warbly, like the speed was increasing and decreasing quickly.
 
A Sony STR-G3 AVR. It was missing the mouse like remote and there wasn't much functionality without it.
 
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