Most overrated audio manufacturers?

09-22-14: Geoffkait
Strange, nobody has mentioned Sony or Panasonic which I think both make a very wide range of excellent products

It's really contradictive to the subject. Overrated is "higher rated" per given performance. Wide range of excellent products that are indeed excellent can't be considered overrated.

At this point I'd have to say Ayon and Wilson. And by virtue of Audiolabyrinth's understated claims that Taralabs is the mythical Shanri La, the holy grail of cables which will transform $690 speakers into $35,000 reference tranducers, i'll add Taralabs to the list.

07-04-14: Harri009
Every Wilson speaker under the Maxx line.

+ 1!

Tara Labs used to offer once affordable and reasonably priced products. Then they 'upgraded' and became full of snit.

It is hard to call low-cost gear overrated, IMO. Nevertheless, there are a couple of names that come to mind here: ASI cables and Grover Huffman cables. Too much hoopla for too little performance.

It is easier to call high-priced gear overrated. A number of items come to mind here: the EMM CDSA SE CD player was a $11,500 total dud. IMO, it simply rode on the wake of the name Ed Meitner. Gabriel Gold cables were a total dud. Some of their prices have since come down to visit us on planet Earth. The AMR DP-777 blew up twice. They had design problems but instead of disclosing this to customers they decided to cover up the fact.

The Berkeley 1 DAC. Never mind what the revered Robert Hartley has to say. I have the feeling he may just be cutting and pasting to save writing time. Like Ted Denney for his Synergistic Research Tesla series cables -- and many other products including the famous Cells. In any case, he needs to start using spell check. He continues to write then in place of than. And he needs to use "increase font size" on his site that continues to use font size 4 -- maybe to prevent folks from reading the fine print.