Worst Hi-Fi

Toby,

Isn't everything relative?   Of course the Alba wasn't up to much in purely sonic terms.  Prior to my first seperates I had a Phillips music centre - probably £60 - rocked out on that I did. 

In more recent times I've heard stuff I wouldn't buy but everyone has their own preferences. 

Regards,

Lindsay

Toby

Having a Roksan Xerxes back in 1987 was nothing but trouble.I loved what it did over the LP 12 sound wise and changed from a LP 12  Ittok Troika to a Xerxes Artemiz Shiraz.Every 3 months the power supply would overheat and almost catch fire a year later when I was on number 3 that lasted a week I thought bollocks and sold it.

Shame great sounding deck.....But trouble.Went back to a LP 12 after that and still getting much pleasure from it.

Your new Avatar is very Blade runner,like it.

Cheers Ian

I bought an audiotronics deck from a company called Laskeys when I was in my teens, the usp to me was It was the only deck I could afford at the time,  it wasn't long before I started to rename it audioCronic!!!

It was paired with a goodmans 40wpc amp and Rotel speakers.

All I can say in my defence is,  I was young and broke....

No. I am happy with my old existing stuff. See no need to invetigate newer cheaper stuff. 

Nothing recent that I've had counts as bad. The worst hifi I've had was my very first (though at the time I thought it sounded great!), assembled/constructed on an extremely tight budget (£60 total) in about 1969 whan I was about 15, with Garrard SP25II, Sinclair Project 60 bareboard preamp and Z30 power amp modules and home-made PS, into home-made speakers comprising reflex loaded 8" full range driver. Sounded fantastic to me, never having heard my music on anything other than my brother's Dansette or in shop record listening booths. "Impressive mind--bending sound" the magazine reviewer said of Saucerful of Secrets when my system was featured as a reader's system, but they were less complimentary about Beethoven's 6th... Bass was great, if slow by modern standards (I can still hear in my head the impressive punch when the bass comes in a few bars into the Beatles' Here Comes The Sun the first time I played it, never having experienced that before) - but a certain absence of virtually any treble to speak of! Mk 2 speakers which relegated those drivers to midrange only revealed the missing top end as well as deeper bass (wow, cymbals!) but there were two other problems: the annoying idler wheel rumble from the turntable, prompting a change to Thorens TD150 as soon as I could afford, and a propensity for the amp's output transistors to emit a smell of burning and coil of smoke, and go silent until replaced (I'm sure to my parents'and their neighbours'relief), resolved when I changed to dual monoblock design with bridged Z50s.

Otherwise the only bad hifi I've heard has been other people's systems, most of which can be excused because they didn't even pretend to be hifi, but when in the late 80s my then brother-in-law to be proudly played his recently purchased LP12 through IBL speakers I struggled to be polite. Later when he first heard my system he suddenly lost interest in playing music on his - until a couple of years late Isold him my IMF TLS50s when I upgraded..

I think part of the point of Toby's post is where you start your hifi journey when young and skint. I went to uni with an all-in-one Panasonic unit which I thought was the bees knees until I heard something better (in my case a trip to The Sound Organisation at London Bridge).....never looked back since, but do have to say played many an LP on that Panasonic even though now know how much better a sound I get....different times!!

Had Roxan Xerxes too,  and while it sounded wonderful I had to face a lot of technical (production) problems with it. Also had to get rid of it.

In HiFi terms I've never been happier than when I was a student and just had a simple record player amp and speakers system (Linn Basik/NAD3020e/NAD8020e). Since then everything (including life) became more complicated and something was lost. 

Anyway, my worst component was a Garrard Direct Drive turntable DD-130. Utter pish. It couldn't keep a consistent speed during loud passages on the record. Later I read a review of it in an old HiFi mag and they noted the same problem. 

It was replaced by the Linn and I stayed happy (but in poverty) for the next couple of years. 

My brother has a system of Sugden separates, fairly recent vintage and not trivial amount of money. They feed into big boxy ProAc speakers. Not current models I think.

The speakers are on stands that he bought 25yrs ago and were about £5. They are wedged in the corners of the room because his wife (quite rightly) thinks they look too big when in the 'correct' position. The cables are old QED 79 strand.

The whole sounds grim. Muddy, thuddy, slow and lifeless. It also breaks down; the tuner and amp have been repaired by Sugden several times each.

I have no idea if this system could sound good if properly set up and with a bit of tweaking. I think the individual bits and pieces are pretty decent. He bought them on the basis of WhatHiFi reviews rather than a demo. However in current installation it is awful. Not just me that thinks so either; he has tried various things like putting stone pucks under the spikes on the stands and buying squashy silicon feet on which the CD player now sit. He has wielded the green pen around the edges of his CDs. He also bought two heavy machined aluminium cone-shaped items that now sit on top of the speaker cabinets and are supposed to improve the sound.

I think he might be better starting again.

He never gets to hear my system. Perhaps he'd hate mine!

Bruce

Bruce Woodhouse posted:

The speakers ....are wedged in the corners of the room....

The root of your brother's problem, surely. Suggies are decent.

Chris

Roksan Kandy K2 was the most disappointing purchase. No idea how it won awards.

The investment in DACs is generally fairly fruitless. The only one I have felt that has made a real difference was Hugo TT. Before that had DAC v1, Beresford, Cambridge audio, all much of a muchness.

I had a succession of faulty, early NAD3020s but this is not quite what TobyJug is asking about. The last of three was replaced with a JVC JAS11G. I was delighted because it had more power, it had to be better right? But I heard a working NAD3020 into similar speakers to mine a couple of years later, and had a moment of insight into the NAD's warm, engaging appeal.

C.

I had a Denon tape deck years ago I thought was bad. There was a really good one in the range, and I was going to buy it, but they replaced it with a new model and I bought that one instead, without an audition. Big mistake. 

Other than that, I listened to a Linn Exakt system recently and thought it sounded amazing . . . at first. But after a while its relentless accuracy started to seem a bit harsh, almost as if it was trying to find flaws rather than make music. After an hour I'd had enough. Not that I'm in the market for such things, but it does show how easy it could be to waste thirty grand or so.

I cannot say that I've ever owned any audio equipment which has delivered less than enjoyable sound - at a budget I could justify at the time. Hopefully each change made has been an improvement, so the 'worst' would probably be the first. But at the time I loved it; it allowed me to listen to music in my bedroom at home.

I have made changes which I subsequently realised didn't really deliver an audio improvement over the equipment it replaced. Most notable was when I swapped my Naim Audio CDi for a CDS2. The CDi definitely sounded more musical than the CDS2, but ithe puck on the latter was better at stopping the disc from slipping. The worst performance was a big price to pay for the convenience and reliability of the less rattly mechanism. 

I also had a bad experience with the original Roksan Xerxes.

When I had a dealer demo against an LP12, I too felt it sounded better, so I ordered the Xerxes and also paid a premium for the rosewood finished version.

Very soon though, the power supply would fail to switch from 33 to 45 (45 was a speed I regularly needed). The power supply would also run very hot, to the point where the rosewoood finish was splitting from back to front and needed to be replaced. In fairness, my dealer at the time took it very seriously, he actually came to my house to look at it, bringing the Roksan MD, Touraj Moghaddam, with him. 

I assumed that I was an isolated case, but from reading the replies above it seems not. 

The Xerxes was replaced by a Gyrodec, which I still own to this day.

Bought a Rega Planar 3 with Sumiko Blue Point MM cart back in 1997. It sounded good at the dealer but the one i got was crap. Pitch stability was very poor, fit and finish was bad. FM sounded 1000x better. Hifi Choice also reported the pitch instability which i read after i bought the damn thing So that was probably my most poor hifi gear the last 20 years.   

Less a question of worst Hi-Fi, more a case of pleasure gained from the music.

Can I honestly say that, with the passing of time, my Naim system excites me any more than my Dansette did, when I was 14 years old?

Moot point, and my repeated playing of The Stones in mono boxset seems to bear this out.

Perception and appreciation change over the years, but I still recall the thrill of that first Stones album, played endlessly on a fairly crap record player.

I'll get me coat.

Never had a bad system because they all played music

From my original Dansette to my current system; even my B&O BeoSystem in the late 80's (bought for its looks) played music quite nicely thank you although probably the worst in terms of VFM.

I remember when at university I bought some used vinyl off another student who was seling most of his collection to fund buying some Thorens deck ... crazy ... it's all about the music.

Allan

I bought a Pink Triangle LPT from English Audio in Hereford in the early 90s, the serial number was 666 and someone had written scary next to it on the box, after a couple of weeks the pink lid started to come apart, the knob on the front had come loose and one morning i put it on and the platter started to go backwards ! I changed it for a Gyro Dek soon after, this lasted for over twenty years and was faultless.

Karl

dave marshall posted:

Less a question of worst Hi-Fi, more a case of pleasure gained from the music.

Can I honestly say that, with the passing of time, my Naim system excites me any more than my Dansette did, when I was 14 years old?

Moot point, and my repeated playing of The Stones in mono boxset seems to bear this out.

Perception and appreciation change over the years, but I still recall the thrill of that first Stones album, played endlessly on a fairly crap record player.

I'll get me coat.

Whenever I 'stole' an opportunity to play my first few records on my brother's Dansette (actually I think it was a different brand of the same tyoe of single box lift lid mono record player -with autochanger which I never used), I found it sounded best with both bass and treble controls turned to max. But learning about stereo and hifi made me hanker after something better, and it was such a revelation to hear how much better things sounded.

I really don't understand interest in mono, though admittedly some early 'pop' stereo was very odd, e.g. with instruments one side and vocals the other, which if taken to the extreme can be rather distracting.

In the days before discovering wooden turntables and black box electronics, I visited several hifi shows where there were many men with beards listening to banks of speakers, each selectable via a central selector panel.  Proper, serious hifi came from Japan in brushed aluminium cases with large toggle switches and beautifully turned volume knobs.

So as a proud and knowledgeable 16 year old (how little did I really know!), I invested in the biggest and baddest set of electronics that I could afford, pairing them with the aristocracy of speakers - B&W, of course.

Here we are, Hitachi's finest duo of tuner and integrated amplifier:

The tuner was a wonderful thing.  The frequency dial was like a large slide rule, an absolute joy.  And the tactile feel of the tuning knob has remained unmatched in my experience until Naim brought out the ones that sit atop the Statement pre-amp, the Musos and the new Uniti range.

It was the amplifier that warrants inclusion in this thread.  It was huge, as in HUGE.  Over 100 Watts/channel and heavy as a 555PS.  Awesome toggle switches too.  They took almost as much effort to move as a point lever in a railway signal box.  There was, however, a small glitch with mine.  Every now and then, without warning, it would switch off the right hand channel and pump all 100+ Watts into the left speaker channel, popping my ears, blowing the left hand tweeter and enraging the rest of the household.  So it had to go.

I still miss the tactile feel of its controls.  Every time we use the Muso Qb, its volume knob reminds me of that wonderful Hitachi pairing.

Best regards, FT 

All that Japanese silverware bristling with knobs and dials was starting to become available when I was building my first hifi, but to those in the know it was (mainly) the British hifi components that sounded best, even if they looked relatively drab. I was never tempted by the glitz, but many people were - and I imagine some of it may have actually sounded good.

In those days, the THD from most amplifiers was negligibly small, so they therefore had to sound the same.  Speakers were far more important.

I ended up replacing the magnificent Hitachi monster with a far more humble beast.  There was a small company called A&R Cambridge, based in a place called Huntingdon and they had launched a new product in a wooden case that could barely summon 30 Watts per channel.  It was called the A60 but those 30 Watts must have been carefully pre-selected, as they did sound rather good.

I first heard it at Robert Ritchie's hifi shop in Montrose and it sounded really rather good.  There were also some strange black boxes from a company called Naim.  At least they had a chrome bumper surround, which indicated that they could be nearly as good as proper, aluminium fronted, Japanese electronics, or so I thought ... 

Innocent Bystander posted:

but to those in the know it was (mainly) the British hifi components that sounded best.

 most of the vintage British hifi was crap, build like an Italian 70/80's car had crap components and sounded like crap. The Japanse had their best products made in those days! 

Karl posted:

I bought a Pink Triangle LPT from English Audio in Hereford in the early 90s, the serial number was 666 and someone had written scary next to it on the box, after a couple of weeks the pink lid started to come apart, the knob on the front had come loose and one morning i put it on and the platter started to go backwards ! I changed it for a Gyro Dek soon after, this lasted for over twenty years and was faultless.

Karl

Splendid tale! This had me in fits of laughter!

As did Foottapper's Hitachi story.