Well it was only a regret as the grief I got from the missus was too much… fantastic sounding and looking (to my eyes) Mitchell allecto minis and orca pre. I could not get them on my rack so sat on the floor…
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Not sure what I regret buying, but I could write a long list of the things I regret selling
LP12, Nait 3, NAP 90, Flatcap, Ruark Sabres and not keeping my Technics Turntable
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nad turntable
Sonus Faber Elipsas
Claude
Regret buying? Nothing.
Regret not buying is another matter! (But not active regrets as I don’t do them.)
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Mission Cyrus One amplifier.
I bought it after a demo alongside the Audiolab 8000A and Mission Cyrus Two back in the early 80s or thereabouts. The Audiolab in particular was much better, but I wasn’t earning very much in those days and so I decided to economise and go with the Mission. It lasted all of two days before I returned to the shop and paid the extra for the Audiolab. What a difference and a relief when I got it back home.
It wasn’t a big deal though, because I was able to exchange it. My brother has my original Audiolab 8000A and it’s still going strong. I later bought a slightly newer 8000A on Ebay which still serves my bedroom system very well.
My brother had a similar experience when he bought an Acoustic Research A6 amplifier (well reviewed - initially impressive, but after a while a very ‘thin’ sound)in the 80s. It also lasted only for a few days until he exchanged it for a Musical Fidelity A1. The A1 wasn’t as good as my Audioab, but still pretty good and significantly cheaper.
Uniti Star. All in one. Should have go to separate at one go.
Cyrus CDi CD Player
What a piece of crap that was. Never played a CD without skipping, mechanism was a piece of crap and when I complained about it I was told that I did not know how to load a CD. Never again will I buy any Cyrus products. What I will say is when on the rare occasions that it did work it did sound good.
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Two Qb’s (and separate ChromeCast Audio’s to go with them), a couple of months before the 2nd gen were announced.
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One of my first transactions on that ‘buyer beware’ website that is fleabay was a seemingly well-specced LP12.
Collected it and oh deary me…
Thankfully, the individual pieces (arm/knackered cartridge but a superb brand) when the unit was broken-up enabled just about full £’s recovery 3Y’s later. Phew.
A Disco Antistat Record Cleaner. Left lots of gunk on records, resulting in lots of stylus cleaning and damaged more than a few LP label rims.
Can’t think of any serious regrets, other than maybe a pair of Mission bookshelf speakers about 25 years ago that What HiFi deemed the greatest speakers ever [for that market sector & price point] but were completely so-so.
Over almost 40 years virtually everything I’ve ever bought has been moved on sooner or later, but it’s all been a continuous process of discovery and sometimes pleasure and more often disappointment, and worth the experience.
Back in the 1980s, several sideways moves…all this stopped when I discovered a good dealer who stocked Linn and Naim.
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2 x Raspberry Pi with HiFiberry HATs - this was before I discovered that LMS2UPnP software ran on my Mac, and after I failed to get the software to run on the RPi.
That is concerning! Doesn’t disappointment lead to regret?
And that reminds me of one I had forgotten, that I did regret buying: XP5XS to add to my ND5XS: The improvement was so marginal as to not be worth the cost, even though I had bought ex-dem. (I had bought remotely without hearing, not living anywhere near a dealer.) i sold it on and bought Hugo, very much greater improvement. I lost a couple of £hundred over the process, which was annoying - but at least Hugo took my mind off it! The PS is the only item I’ve moved on that quickly, and the only disappointment I’ve had.
NO COMMENT . 
Olive HD music server. Sounded great and looked good with its unusual styling. But as unreliable as hell on both hardware and software fronts. Then the company went bust…
I chose it over a HDX at the time, as it was significantly cheaper and not hugely different in sound quality. Dealer was embarrassed about selling to me and gave me a decent discount on a ND5-XS, but still a fair bit of money down the drain and heartache in trying to keep it running.
Not generally, in most cases upgrades have been improvements but maybe not as big a leap forward as hoped for once in place. I don’t think I’d have enjoyed it as much, getting to this point without the stumbles and trials & tribulations of the 30-odd years it’s taken to get here. It increases the appreciation and the awareness that it does take time & effort to find what works. I no longer wonder if B might be better than A.
Biggest 4 mistakes…Probably buying a Sony amp, which I later changed for a JVC amp which I then changed for another (allegedly better) JVC amp, which I then changed for a NAD amp. The NAD stayed for well over a year before I bit the bullet and bought a Nait 2.
The Nait 2 lasted a month or so before I upgraded and bought a 72 and 140 which stayed for at least 5 years!
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