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Whats the most dissapointing speaker you've ever heard?

nick parkin

nick parkin

Well-Known Member
Greetings all!

Whats the most disappointing speaker you've ever heard?

Not just bad sounding and cheap, but a speaker that is made by a reputable company who should know what they're doing but has managed to produce a horrible sounding speaker with an equally horrible price tag.

Bose does not count. we all know Bose sucks so lets get that out of the way
 
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Two days ago a friend of mine took me along to a guy he knows that loves audio. He had two recently recapped and "worked on" (I did not get exactly what else was done) AR 3s. They were in a decently large listening room and were powered by an older Mark Levinson integrated amp.

He played some jazz and some acoustic guitar and some older rock. And they sounded, nice. Nice highs, nicely detailed and yep, you guessed it, nice bass as well. But they certainly were not stunning by any measure. That was my first experience with anything AR and I frankly expected something more. I have been reading on here for years about them and thought I would be stunned.....and I was not. They are a very nice sounding speaker for sure, but not better than my KLH 6s or Imperial 6s.....and maybe not better than my Optimus 5s.

So I guess that would qualify.
 
Yes I.B.T.L. #2. I’ll play to a limited end; I had a pair of Escalante Juniper 2. They are an isobaric design, but had limited bass. I think there was a crossover issue from the factory.
 
To start off a thread with this, insulting the numerous members here that own and love their Bose is a bit contentious.

"Bose does not count. we all know Bose sucks so lets get that out of the way"



With that in mind, here you go, but I must admit this did it's job very well so I wasn't let down in the least.
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If you mean consumer Hifi speaker. Bose. 901 and all its cousins. Next because it was the first time I heard JBL's bullet ring radiator, the Mighty Paragon. EV sloppy 30 " woofer in an 800 Patrician. I haven't heard a decent Magnapan since the Tympani 4. Any of Mac current speakers with the metal upper mid and metal very resonant tweeters. The list goes on. It would be easier to ask me which speakers I like.
 
from speakers i've personally heard/owned, i would have to say the worst, for my personal preferences was the b&w cdm-1's. even for a bookshelf speaker, it was overloaded with midbass, and no treble to balance it out. it is a very genre specific speaker, i was only able to listen to jazz and classical on these and enjoy it, which wasnt worth the amount of time it took to find a sweet spot in my room for these. they made it into my rotation only once since purchasing, they spend most of their days stored, i should probably sell them but i keep thinking maybe one day i'll find myself liking them again
 
Some giant Dunlavy's. They were very lacking in the lower end, but it could have been the room they were in, because I couldn't really believe something that big could be so lean.

At the other end of the spectrum, some kind of 4" full-range (Fostex?) driver in a transmission line enclosure. No highs, no lows, all yappy and shouty. Piano sounded realistic and the imaging was fantastic, don't get me wrong. :p
 
KEF concertos. I heard a pair of mint condition Concertos and they were just horrible. Like my ears were being twisted. Squeaky, squawky and dry. Several years later I picked up a pair in perfect condition and they too, were horrible. I couldn't understand why there was ever a fuss about them back in the day. I stripped the drivers out, on-sold them and took great pleasure in throwing the cabinets on the rubbish tip.

We are so lucky these days, most speakers have some redeeming qualities, at every price. Speaker drivers and cabinet design is so much better than it was. Consider what level of sound you can get for $300 in a compact 2 way stand mounter.
 
Mcintosh ML-2C. Ponderous, with no exceptional qualities that I could discern, other than the magnificent cabinetry. But of course they might well suit someone else's preferences just fine.

But given the trouble involved in recapping them, replacing the surrounds, moving them, getting them set up, and obtaining the recommended equalizer, I was sorely disappointed.

Thankfully, I did all of that work for a client rather than for myself.
 
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I'm not gonna' claim either of these is horrible, because they're not. Let's just say I was underwhelmed.

1) EPI Stat 450. EPIs one and only speaker using an electrostat panel. Not bad sounding if you were directly in front of it but move over a couple inches and the sound would just collapse. Not good.

2) Klipsch Heresy. I've no idea what the appeal of these is. The only good thing I can say about them is that both pairs that ended up in my posession got flipped....... for a profit.
 
Ohighway said:
I'm not gonna' claim either of these is horrible, because they're not. Let's just say I was underwhelmed.

1) EPI Stat 450. EPIs one and only speaker using an electrostat panel. Not bad sounding if you were directly in front of it but move over a couple inches and the sound would just collapse. Not good.

2) Klipsch Heresy. I've no idea what the appeal of these is. The only good thing I can say about them is that both pairs that ended up in my posession got flipped....... for a profit.
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Ditto on the Heresy. Well built, nice looking and I cant stand to listen to them. Horns murder my ears.
 
toxcrusadr said:
Some giant Dunlavy's. They were very lacking in the lower end, but it could have been the room they were in, because I couldn't really believe something that big could be so lean.

At the other end of the spectrum, some kind of 4" full-range (Fostex?) driver in a transmission line enclosure. No highs, no lows, all yappy and shouty. Piano sounded realistic and the imaging was fantastic, don't get me wrong. :p
Click to expand...

Have to chime in.

Oh god I agree. I had to sell them at CSA, we had the SC-IV and the SC-V all properly set up by the man himself (so I was told, wasn’t there that day) with the right electronics (FPB-600, ARC REF. 1 DAC and CD spinner), an excellent room and new electrical service. In other words, all of the ingredients for a fine experience. Nope. They were like giant party speakers. No nuance nor any trace of the micro. Macro, yes. Bombastic, yes. The midbass to bass transition was lumpy and at the same time boxy. We tried other amps and preamps, cables, etc. Nope.

Funny, the MTM Dunlavy SC-1 were quite good.

I’d almost always try to switch folks over to the Alon speakers we also had handy.
 
:lurk::naughty:


Probably my brothers GPX shelf system's speakers - volume cranked; 3-band EQ all up; FM station almost tuned in... I walked in, turned it down, then walked back out.
 
Sansui SP-X7's. There's a whole series of these, from the X6 to the X9. Amazing lack of bass for a 15" woofer. I'm guessing the magnet is an ounce or two. Tweeters that will shoot a dart through you eardrums. I'm not sure what Sansui was thinking here, except that they really look good sitting on a shelf, so I'm sure servicemen bought them in droves from BX's/PX's around the globe. Thank goodness I got mine at a flea-market for about $10 just so I could hear them 1st-hand.

Honorable mention to the short lived BIC's that had a voice-coil driving a flat slab of Styrofoam, so that they could be hung on a wall like a picture. I remember the day the rep demo'd them for us. We looked at him, then looked at the calendar to see if it was April 1st.

Sansui_SP-X7.jpg
 
Most disappointing from a reputable company? Hmmm. I’ll nominate two for different reasons.

1. AR-LST

From the initial press and fawning over by Julian Hirsch and others, I thought it would be a real treat to hear them (circa 1973 or so when I was a teen). What I heard was dull, not engaging nor dynamic despite being driven by a Phase Linear 700 at a dealer in Atlanta. Even the sales guy called them “toads”. They looked good on paper, but...

2. JBL 4311/Century 100

A fabulously popular range of speakers that were widely used in studios. They substituted true first octave response (like you’d find on an Advent) for a boosted upper bass along with an exaggerated upper midrange. Their greatest sin to me was their inconsistent directivity between the midrange/tweeter creating an hour glass shaped image from a frequency perspective. Asking a 5” driver to reproduce a 2.5” wavelength results in a collapse of dispersion. Which would be less noticeable had it not transitioned to a perfectly wonderful dome tweeter sitting in its sweet spot. Very distracting discontinuity from this admitted coherency freak even back then.
 
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