Highly praised hear you just didn’t care for?
Have you ever owned any gear that’s gotten universal or near universal praise that your ultimately just didn’t care for at all?
I once owned a Linn Troika cartridge. In the Linnosphere this is a highly regarded and dare I saw worshipped cartridge. Well, I bought one, and yes, midrange and above it was lovely but the cartridge, to my ears, was dynamically deficient. My next cartridge was a Linn Arkiv B which I found far more satisfactory.
All was not lost- I sold my Troika to someone who was thrilled to have a Troika. Actually sold it for more than I paid. I will say the Troika was a nice shade of red and was very easy to mount.
Very few regrets in this hobby, I wanted to try a single driver "wideband" speaker. Bought a pair of Omega Alnico Monitors. I fell out of love pretty fast. Didn't even own them 8 months before trying to sell them ...that took a few months too. I took a beating on those. Thought they were great at first but they struggled with some content and completely lost composure at louder volumes. Plus I really missed not having a tweeter. |
Luckily I demo all my gear before I purchase so I never had to eat the cost of an unwanted piece of equipment. Highly recommend this when possible. One piece of equipment I had that gets a lot of praise that I absolute hated was Nordost Frey power cabling. I tried it, Shunyata gamma, Analysis Plus cabling, and Cardas parsec power cabling. The Frey sounded so etched and weird in my system. Like it was adding detail that didn't exist and no one asked for. I'm sure they may synergize well in some systems but in mine they were an absolute NO. My system is very sensitive to cable changes and luckily for my wallet, I found the Cardas parsec to be the best in my system by a good margin. Dynamics, clarity and sense of realism are what I look for in my systems. |
@lanx0003 The ICON being compared to a reference level system of that cost/caliber is ridiculous. I had one for a couple of weeks. While I think it is a good one box solution for the money, the $6K Lumin T3X I ended up with completely blew it away. Not even close. No surprise either, obviously. But, if the NANO is close to the ICON, that's a real bargain for someone entering Hi-Fi/streaming. Now on to the OP's question (yet another survey): Roger's High-Fidelity EHF-200 Mk2. Crap amp, and worse Company. Getting rid of the Roger's and ending up with my T+A integrated was one of the happiest moments in my short "audiophile" journey. |
I think every audiophile at some point has been mislead by reviewers in respected audiophile mags. On the whole, reviewers I feel are an honest lot, but sometimes they miss the boat. In my case, I jumped on the DCM Time Window fad in the mid '80s and traded in a pair of excellent Spendor Monitors, the latter being a much better speaker in hindsight. I dumped the Time Windows within a year. Sometimes it takes a while to get it. My second big awful purchase was a pair of Kenwood L-07M amplifiers, praised by Harry Pearson of TAS as a breakthrough in solid state amplification. They were not bad, but did not hold a candle to my prior bridged Dynaco Stereo 70s. After owning those, I was so glad to get back to tubes.
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I recently had the Imersiv D-1 DAC in my home for a 2 week demo and just didn't care for it at all. Very popular DAC with huge praise by almost everyone. I had high hopes for the DAC and thought it would be a great match for my system. I'm happy for those people that ultimately decided it was so good for their system but was not a good match for me. The search goes on! |
