Enough already of all the "what's your favourite..." threads, how about the opposite?
Which piece of gear just fills you with dismay every time you're stuck with having to use it? What audio equipment ruins your gig/session by ruining your mood and makes you angry every time? It doesn't even have to be that bad, this is subjective - what item do you hate rationally or otherwise?

I'll start. 3/8" to 5/8" thread adapters. 'Nuff said.

too many to mention!

analog tape is pretty bad and most any ribbon mic too! digico and midas digital desks get some heat, profools of course but also pyranix, that there are way too many aoip formats and no common protocol for remote control of preamps...

...but at the very bottom of the list is (all gear from) evil b!

SD cards... because I always forget them, usually by leaving them in the card reader slot on my computer at home

Mic boom clamps with undersized handles

Three words: MD421 mic clips.

They hate me equally.

SM57

Luckily one hasn't ruined my day in many years.

There are more than a few rooms in town that have too many crap mic stands that belong in the dumpster and unlike say a mic I don’t like (*cough SM7B *cough), I have no choice but to suffer having to use them on a session. The thing that bums me out the most though is a studio with poor acoustics. It just ruins everything. Thankfully I am almost entirely able to avoid getting into that situation these days.

How about worst sounding console or pre-amp, crappiest brand of guitar or mic lead, most inconsistent QC and generally worst sound in a run of mics (APART from the C2, that's too easy), crashing-est software or plug-in, or even stupidest packaging of an otherwise OK product you need to buy.

I don't know what everyone else calls them but I call them bear traps, those folding welded home-made bases for stages and drum risers every production company in the universe has, that bite your fingers and the hinges work loose and the boards never sit flat

Or, any piece of equipment with analogue RCA connectors

The part of the interface for X32/M32 consoles where you configure the digital stage box.

When you go from one job with one box to the next one with 2 or vice versa that's just unnecessarily obscure and unintuitive. It's fine if you use that console all the time but I have to work with different digital consoles and it might be months between jobs on the same type, I can't remember all the menus and interfaces for every different system. When the time pressure is on it's just too hard to find and work out.

Recently I did some jobs in remote sites in the NW Australian mining region. I then discovered only one telco's network gives you any coverage outside the 3 largest towns and not the network I'm on. We had some Midas I'd never seen and it wouldn't talk to its stage box. So with a borrowed phone (I'm on Android and this was iOS, natch) I asked ask the only available guy from the production company, how do you do this, on a poor connection to hundreds of miles away, when he's busy trying to set up his own job and isn't an audio guy anyway. Just to add to the fun, we had SMS and calls only, no data out there, so he could search for manuals for us online and send screenshots of what he thought was the right page in lo-res... and then ours had all different firmware to the version he was looking at anyway, yay!! The band was already on-stage patiently waiting to soundcheck with the clock ticking and we still couldn't get this damn stage box to talk so I made the call, right! Get the other console, set up side of stage and plug the mics straight in.
Thank you, interface designers.

AKG 414 B-ULS. I have a pair and although I put them up somewhat regularly, I don't choose them.

Perhaps I am just bad at my job.

What's the solution you recommend to remedy this problem?

Burying the setting for this under fewer layers of menu. I can't remember my way to that one on a desk I se maybe twice a year.
For that matter I've often wished someone, maybe AES, would define an interface for mixing consoles, and you could switch from the in-built proprietary one to the open one if you need to. That's one suggestion, but I don't know if it'd be practical for a soec like that to cover stuff like that situation with the stage boxes

EDIT this is a pet hates thread anyway, it's ok to just bitch about stuff here if you find it a pain

...a much easier solution is to ditch any gear using aes50!

Oh yeah I forgot... "I really hate AES50!"

I've used plenty of kit a lot of you might hate, but I've gotten something usable/useful out of all of it bar one - the Yamaha R1000. Every possible setting on that thing sounds horrid.

Trying to jog my memory without cheating and using Google...was that their 1RU digital reverb from the early 1980s (pre-REV7 or SPX-90) with a few presets actuated by pushbuttons, no LCD screen or programmability to speak of? Or am I totally misremembering?

Whatever it is I'm thinking of, that did indeed suck.

There was a REV-1, I thought that was the old 4-button unit with 4 pretty ghastly programs. I'm trying to work it out without googling too but I'll do so when I get home

I was never crazy about synchronizers in general, which gave a whole new meaning to "runaway slaves," but there was this particular one called the Q-Lock that definitely put the "Post" in PTSD.

I hate anything and everything that combines things together. No god damnit I do not want powered speakers with Bluetooth, onboard mix controls, or an espresso maker. I hate the combination of more and more low quality components stuffed into one unit that is then sold as a miracle of invention.

Hellz yeah. In audiophile-hifi land IMO the last several years have had very few advances in actual audio but it's all about "connectivity"; some formerly decent brands have actually made lower-grade gear so they can afford to throw in Bluetooth, Wifi and the ubiquitous, compulsory touch-screen, of course. I'd rather have just a metal knob worth, say, one buck, no wireless options and the money go on a better audio circuit but that's not enough bells and whistles for marketing. Methinks some prosumer and even actual pro gear suffers the same fate

No you're right, 4 buttons for 4 programs.
https://reverb.com/au/p/yamaha-r1000...-reverberation
That thing sucked so much it left a hard vacuum.
The REV-1 was one of their much higher-end units https://reverb.com/au/p/yamaha-rev-1...remote-control
I don't remember if it was pre- or post-REV7, and there was also a REV5

You could get fired from some places for using a REV7 and leaving it on program 1
Let's hate them together.

This useless piece a junk is a powered speaker with a radio tuner in it and a stereo aux input that sums to mono. Stupid thing is 'sposed to help me mix. Straight to the bin!

hipster's version of the auratone...

(is it that bad?)

Definitely agree with mic stands, and general hardware issues like mic clips.

Inexpensive patchbays suck and the thing I hate most at any price point: cooling fans!!!

I made a preset aux send in protools that’s panned to mono and has an eq plug-in set to imitate am radio. Works great!

All sarcasm aside, it's an extremely useful tool for me. Really glad I have it.

I hate any new gear that’s purposely “limited edition” to create some sort of unobtanium fake scarcity vibe.

Any thing that turns gear into trading cards or flip investments or collectables and not tools is hate-worthy.

Lots of hate here for the collectimentality. “I need this to complete my collection”

how comes that i'm not so sure whether your above or previous post was (more) sarcastic...?!

(i'm using a fostex 6301nd)

The Fostex is good, too, but different. The Tivoli has this faux-bass bump that I find to be very representative of what a lot of other consumer big-bass-in-a-small-box speakers are gonna do. Like I said, a useful tool.