What was your best (and worst) audio purchase for the dollar?

[MattJ]

Best : Hsu VTF2 Mk5 subwoofer. Big and not the best looking, but WOW that bass. Close second goes to a pair of FMod 100hz passive high pass filters. Noticeable improvement in the midrange.

Worst : Carver CT17 pre-tuner. Not a train wreck by any means, but sound quality not as expected; annoying channel imbalance at low volume setting.

 

[Loathecliff]

Best:- Difficult as bought mostly used after the first (& worst).
There have been so many great (& fun) buys at household auctions, but the best for purchase price was a Thorens TD160.
Lying at a drunken angle in a cardboard box, along with an Armstrong 600? series amp, a toaster and various brushes:- £2.
The faulty amp was sold for £12; the toaster dumped, & the long handled wooden clothes brush was perfect for sorting out the young (& missed) minx who lived in the apartment opposite.

Worst:- Truvox amp, tuner, and speakers. 1968
Twenty-five years later I was told I could have bought a cottage in Co. Wexford for a similar price.

 

[fatnoah]

Best: A pair of Cambridge Soundworks Tower II speaker from Ebay for $300 in 2002 or so. They're still the mains for my Home Theater system. At some point I'll probably upgrade them, but they still sound great to me.

Worst: A center channel from the same company. It wasn't expensive at $150, but the tone always sounded wrong to me.

Runner up for best are the KEF R3s that keep my home office sounding great. They weren't cheap, but they've completely rekindled my love of audio and can still bring me to a state of "sounds so good I feel like I'm going to cry".

 

[tvih]

Best: Paradigm Phantom V2 floorstanding speakers. 20€ just last month!

Worst: Dynaudio Confidence C1 standmount speakers, 3400€. Half price for a demo pair with stands. They're absolutely awesome speakers, make no mistake, but budget stuff still wins the bang for buck due to diminishing returns, so here we are If I was sent back in time I probably wouldn't buy them again for that reason, but since I have 'em and they were my dream speaker back then there doesn't seem to be much point in selling them for a (probably big) loss even though I could make do just fine with either the Paradigms, or the Dynaudio Audience 42s that were my main speakers before the C1s. If I ever somehow get a bigger/better place to live in and listen music to (which admittedly doesn't seem to be in the cards in the foreseeable future), maybe I'll actually start to benefit from their additional quality more than I do now. At which point having sold them would suck!

 

[Timstunes]

Made me laugh out loud!

M2

 

[bill poster]

Best, Passlabs X150.5
Worst, Lindemann Musicbook

The contrast in Customer service cdnt be greater. Latter is serving as an expensive paperweight.

 

[Mr. Widget]

The best was my purchase of a pair JBL DD66000s. I won't say the price as they were a special Harman promotion for dealers. They were stunners and I enjoyed them for many years.

The worst was a Rotel RA-1570 integrated amp. I couldn't get rid of it fast enough.

 

[LTig]

The worst was a Rotel RA-1570 integrated amp. I couldn't get rid of it fast enough.

What was the reason?

 

[Mr. Widget]

What was the reason?

I bought it for my girlfriend to replace an old Kenwood and she hated the sound quality of the Rotel. My first thought was that maybe she had the tone controls set in a particular way on the old Kenwood so I looked at it and they were flat. I tried combinations of the Rotel's controls to satisfy her, but I couldn't get its sound to please her.

 

[Doodski]

an old Kenwood

Did it sound a bit flat/missing a bit of high frequency compared to the Rotel? I've heard some old Marantz and Kenwood stuff that was missing the top end of a new modern unit.

 

[Alice of Old Vincennes]

Best Anthem. Worst Emotiva.

 

[Mr. Widget]

Did it sound a bit flat/missing a bit of high frequency compared to the Rotel? I've heard some old Marantz and Kenwood stuff that was missing the top end of a new modern unit.

Honestly it has been about a decade and this wasn't a purchase I made for myself, so when the gift was viscerally rejected I found another Kenwood on eBay for substantially less than the Rotel even at dealer demo and moved on.

FWIW: a few years later the old Kenwood and speakers were replaced with a pair of powered JBL LSR305s. She thought they sounded great... still does. (Possibly a second candidate for best purchase. )

 

[Doodski]

Honestly it has been about a decade and this wasn't a purchase I made for myself, so when the gift was viscerally rejected I found another Kenwood on eBay for substantially less than the Rotel even at dealer demo and moved on.

FWIW: a few years later the old Kenwood and speakers were replaced with a pair of powered JBL LSR305s. She thought they sounded great... still does. (Possibly a second candidate for best purchase. )

It sounds to me like she likes a nice clear sharp top end. Those JBLs are crystal clear.

 

[Mr. Widget]

It sounds to me like she likes a nice clear sharp top end. Those JBLs are crystal clear.

She listens to a lot of live classical music including opera and has a very critical ear. The JBLs passed... the Rotel, not so much.

I mean really, you give a girl a >$1,000 amp and her response is, take it back.

 

[Doodski]

She listens to a lot of live classical music including opera and has a very critical ear. The JBLs passed... the Rotel, not so much.

I mean really, you give a girl a >$1,000 amp and her response is, take it back.

Yeah, I'm a bit miffed on that Rotel refusal too. Rotel is Rotel and there's little to nothing to complain about. The last classical aficionado that I sold speakers to was a classical flutist who was concerned with only the sound and not aesthetics and she really enjoyed MB Quart speakers and after auditioning them over a period of ~6 months she passed on KEF, JBL Ti Series (Which is renowned for having really sparkly top end), Yamaha, Mission, Polk (Which has a nice top end too) and B&W and she bought the MB Quart bookshelf model for ~$1200. She never returned them and said that her practice time was better for having those speakers that she used for listening to flute playing technique and other stuff that a person at her high level of playing the flute listens for. I found that many classical listeners are very critical of the sound and they require something that I can't hear because I am not familiar with classical listening like they are.

 

[markanini]

Etymotic ER4PT, bought for about $300 second hand. I chose them for audio work after reading some fairly technical explanations about the well thought out tuning and unit consistency. In practice it sounded too much like a land line telephone. I tried EQing many different ways but I couldn't get it to sound right. Total waste of time and money.

 

[Keith_W]

Easily Acourate. 286 Euros, and it has totally transformed my system.

 

[Carlton80@0]

The absolute worst.

 

[LTig]

She listens to a lot of live classical music including opera and has a very critical ear. The JBLs passed... the Rotel, not so much.

Same as my wife. When auditioning speakers she preferred the JBL LSR2325 by far over all the others (Krk, Adam, Genelec) except the only K&H which was a O410 and hence far out if resch regarding desirued size and budget. The tonality of the JBL was very close to the O410.

 

[Sokel]

Another worst,miniDSP flex,measured nicely as is,measured horribly after loading the filters,went for refund the next day (last week).