EPOS ES14.  INFURIATINGLY awkward, and won't work properly until you buy three trillion quids' worth of source/amps.

Swapped for Dynaudio Audience 52s and never looked back.

As for cursed hardware, my Sony 525 DVD.  Lipsync bugs, drive errors, and no recourse as it was a Techtronics-modded one.  To cap it off, I bought it over a Pioneer because the Pioneer range of the time had lipsync bugs!

Oh - and also a Sony CDP-M12 midi CD player from 1991 - jumped on perfect discs, and was on the test bench for 3 months of its first year.  Came back with a new laser that was misaligned and thus caused EVEN MORE errors, and the tech had left blutak in the mech so a disc got stuck in it as well, so it had to go back for another 2 months!  Truly ****e.