I sold a Mac MC-275 (an original one) and bought a Phase Linear 400. It wasn't nicknamed the Flame Linear 400 for nothing. It blew 4 woofers in my JansZen Z-600s. The final replacement drivers weren't the same and didn't work well.

And, as I'm sure you know, the PL400's sound sucked, especially compared to the Mac.

Elsewhere on the forum I've praised the mighty klipschorn as a "classic" and the best sounding speaker I've ever heard. Now for the flipside: It is also the most disappointing speaker I've ever heard! How can this be? How can the same speaker be the best and the worst? As you may expect, it's all in the set-up. The devil really is in the details!

A klipschorn is one of the most room-dependent speakers I know of. Of course when you get down to it, all speakers are room dependent, but the k-horn requires corner placement, which means it will excite every resonance in the room, for better or for worse. So, in a good room you get smooth, extended bass, while in a bad one you'll have extremely rough and perhaps not-too-extended bass. And this was the main cause of the horrible sound I heard from a big pair of k-horns at a nice shop in KC MO -boomy and lifeless. Also, size matters! K-horns in a too-small room is a recipe for unhappiness. Again, this was a contributing factor to the bad sound in the KC room, while in the huge STL room, the horns could open up and sing.

The moral of the story is this: Just because that new Rathole 3000 sounded heavenly at the dealers showroom doesn't mean it won't blow when you get it home.

Reminds me of an old girlfriend...."just because she looked good at the bar, doesn't me she won't blow at home....or in fact WILL at home". hehehehehehe

Man, I've had lots of "worsts."

At shows, I've run into systems that sounded as if the music were a cat that didn't want to be dragged out of the speakers.

Speakers that used just the horns of brass horns to inflict pain on the music as it exited the drivers, tweeters whose only connection to accuracy was unintentionally recreating fingernails on blackboard, turntable demos whose manufacturers must have thought that 37 rpm was some hip new standard, oy!

Sometimes, I've felt like the Roy Batty of Hi-Fi.

Oh, there was this one time, a very nice chap was trying to demo some rather dynamic rock music on a Lowther based system that actually made my brain turn on my fight/flight reflex. It had hitherto only happened under more appropriate conditions such as actual danger or on a bad date, but those babies managed to accomplish it without impending doom or shrill behavior!

All in all, the worst experiences have been with systems that may have been OK for one type of listening, but were asked to perform outside their area of expertise.

A Bose radio, at least, is still only expected to sound like a Bose radio. A high end set up, being taken from solo female vocals at 65 dB and placed in the realm of actual music, well, that can be a scary and horrible thing.

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A Bose radio, at least, is still only expected to sound like a Bose radio. A high end set up, being taken from solo female vocals at 65 dB and placed in the realm of actual music, well, that can be a scary and horrible thing.

Damn Buddha, how the heck do you come up with these things. Month after month in pages of Stereophile and some of the other high end magazines the various writers and often the readers wax on about the sad sorry state of high end audio and how not enough young people are buying into the hobby and blah, blah, blah. Then I go and read your simple 31 word sentence and bingo, it's got the whole problem all neatly summed up, nice and tidy with a big pink bow.

Way too much of what passes for high end equipment really doesn't belong there at all. Loudspeakers that cannot reproduce at real life playback levels, Class A equipment with limited low frequency response. How can it be Class A if it's missing such a big portion of the frequency spectrum? How about Class A with limited high frequency response or limited midrange frequency response? Never happen, would it? Now why is that.

I believe that Buddha's statement hit upon the answer. There is quite a bit of music around which doesn't require the entire frequency range and dynamic range that a good high end should be capable of delivering and all too often that music is used to judge high end equipment rather than music which places greater demands on the playback system. No, I'm not talking about getting blown back by Stevie Ray Vaughn's guitar ala playback on DUP's system but perhaps a nice full orchestral recording with lots of dynamic range and the full frequency spectrum. Second choice is a good big band jazz recording.