A lot of the very large and high end systems set up in small hotel rooms at audio shows disappoint me. Could do just as well in a room like that for a fraction of the cost in many cases.
What Gear Has Disappointed You?
While it's clearly not an absolute fact, we tend to have an expectation that a more expensive product should be better. Within a given brand it really should be a fact, but because there's a wide range of factors in play when it comes to pricing it's not necessarily true when comparing different brands. I think that it's fair to say that when we purchase a more expensive product we generally have an expectation that it'll perform better. In the cases where our experience confirms this belief it can be the result of the product actually being better and/or some expectation bias. In a sense, it doesn't really matter which it is.
With this in mind, have you ever purchased a product expecting it to be superior only find that it was clearly inferior in your experience?