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Your top 3 worst purchases ever


Hopefully none from me!

While many are asking what are the best preamps, best amps, best this or best that, wouldn't it be nice for others to know our worst nightmares with certain products?

:-)

My top 3s are:

1) Kora Eclipse preamp
From an Canadian member, the preamp arrived DOA. SInce it was shipped from Canada, return shipping cost and logistics are typically expensive and brutal. So the preamp was sent to a self-proclaimed Kora fan and expert in VA. Turned out, the repair cost was way more than I bargain for. The seller refused to fund it adequately. Ended up a super overpriced purchase with 2 months down time. Lesson learnt: Just return anything that is DOA even the seller talks sweet and offers to repair it to save you money.

2) Kora Galaxy Reference power amp
From the same Canadian member, this unit arrived with all output tubes mixed up. The amps kept blowing fuses and overheat. Bias pots do not work. Again, I was too nice to have it 'repaired' at seller's expense. Not a single penny was collectible from this seller, however. The unit was sent to the same Kora 'guru' who wasted near a grand of my money to fix it - turned out nothing was fixed, the unit suffered additional shipping damages, and I was labelled as a tube idiot by this repairman who just conned me $1k. Out of total frustration, I hammered the amp into pieces and sold it as scrap for $4 in Audiogon. That's a near $3k loss! Lesson learnt: Take anger management class.

3) Krell PAM-3 dual-mono preamp
Arrived working for first few days with noisy volume pot, then the unit caught on fire - the caps melted with lots of tar inside. Seller refused to take it back obviously since it was not DOA. Sent to Krell for repair, only to be told the repair estimate was near $3k (including $350 return shipping cost from Connecticut to New Jersey - $250 of which is for a Krell shipping box). Made perfect sense to me when I had purchased it for $550.

What are your lemons?
bsimpson
pdspecl
254 posts
 
Aragon 2004 MkII - very clean sound with tight bass but lifeless, not musical at all

Sonic Frontiers Power 2 - sounded OK but the selector switch went bad. I emailed Chris J from Parts Connexion who confirmed an issue with the cheap plastic switch for a small percentage of his amps but he refused to cover repairs (although was not under warranty). Would have thought a $5000 amp would not use $6 plastic selector switches.
My friend, a good tech, needed 8 hours to under wires, boards.... to replace a simple switch. Terrible design if you ask me. I sold this beast and acquired Monarchy Audio class A amps which cost less and sound considerably better

NAD C542 cd player - great HDCD sound, CD is average. Skipped almost from the get go. Found out NAD had serious issues with early production runs of this player. My friend also had 2 other more current NAD cd players - both having issues. I will never purchase another NAD cd player

ebm
9,311 posts
 
Dont have any.
ohlala
1,238 posts
 
The worst of my purchases were early on:
1)I bought a pair of those direct-reflecting bose 501 to replace my $50 Pioneer two-ways, and returned them. Man, they were awful.

2)I did not realize how bad my (home-made) flexy rack sounded until it was replaced by a lighter, more wobbly ikea lack.

3) LFD Mistral looked good; sounded bad. Replaced with a far better SA-2000, which of course broke.
reb1208
518 posts
 
I no longer care. That's how unimportant this " hobby" has become to me.
noromance's avatar
noromance
9,984 posts
 
Thorens 318 - leaden, slow, dark, plodding. It did render wood instruments with a nice woody tone however.

Mission Cyrus 2 - So bad, I can oniy assume all the rave reviews were written by maniacs. Everything sounded chromium and brash and digitized.

Audio lab 8000P - sand preamp that basically stole the life out of music. The grocery store muzak playing Tainted Love sounded better than through this thing. Traded it in for a Croft Micro which was a million times better.
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