Your single most significant purchase mistake?

This is easy for me, the biggest mistake I EVER made was buying the ESCALANTE DESIGN FREMONT Loudspeakers. Nothing else comes close. They retailed at $18,990 and had some positive reviews so bought them unheard. Never sounded good out of the box (4 boxes totaling almost 600 pounds!) and was told they take 250 hrs to break-in. After 500 hrs they were still unlistenable. Sold them for maybe 3k. Biggest waste of time, effort and $$$$$$. Here's a link to a review.

Sorry - but I had two - in a row !!!

Enticed by the alure of tubes I purchased a stunning looking Raysonic SP120 tube amp

It looked fantastic but burned through a set of tubes in 6 months

• it had the wrong transformer installed and overheated the tube heaters
• cost me $300 to get it rectified.

It sounded better afterwards but I was told the output transformers were also poor and it wasn’t worth trying to fix it.

SO I replaced the SP120 with a NAIM 5i integrated amp

• sounded fantastic - much better than the SP120
• But after 10 years the caps gave up the ghost - boom!
• apparently - it’s a feature of NAIM amps
• had that fixed for $450 CDN + 3 weeks down time

Moral of the story

• Never trust a salesperson
• be sure to checkout only quality branded products,
• especially on tube amps.

Now I’m Very Happy with my Bryston solid state amp - 20 year warranty!!!

Nothing against tubes - just my own personal preference

Regards - Steve

sksos,

I remember that company. It was started by an expat from Wilson Audio. I read good things too, they were supposed to be efficient for one thing. They went bell-up pretty fast though. That was a terrible financial loss for you. 

Not measuring twice and buying an extra 1.0M worth of interconnects and power cords. It was compounded by the fact that I have mono blocks and two subwoofer amps and they are sited 12 feet from the preamp. That's a lot of extra cables/cords--and they are very fine (and expensive). Ouch. Wish I hadn't done that.

 My ex wife