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What Gear Has Disappointed You?

While it's clearly not an absolute fact, we tend to have an expectation that a more expensive product should be better.  Within a given brand it really should be a fact, but because there's a wide range of factors in play when it comes to pricing it's not necessarily true when comparing different brands.  I think that it's fair to say that when we purchase a more expensive product we generally have an expectation that it'll perform better.  In the cases where our experience confirms this belief it can be the result of the product actually being better and/or some expectation bias. In a sense, it doesn't really matter which it is.

With this in mind, have you ever purchased a product expecting it to be superior only find that it was clearly inferior in your experience?

 

mceljo
dweller's avatar
dweller
3,795 posts
 

Adcom GFP-565 preamp (early Nineties). Highly touted by the Mags but extremely ordinary performance. Replaced with a Classe 6. Now you're talking...

Another was the Magnepan MMG speakers (mid Seventies). Were pleasing to the ear until I heard some Conrad Johnson "Synthesis" floor standers which were clearly superior in every way. Granted, the CJs were 3-4 times the price but...

Lastly, for whatever reason, I've never been able to warm up to Audioquest cables. Not extensive exposure but never seemed to keep them more than a few months. I did own and enjoy their "Lapis" phono cables for a few years.

 

carlsbad's avatar
carlsbad
1,551 posts
 

High wattage ss amplifiers with good (not great) reviews.

Also I switched my utility from regular power to green power and could tell no difference.

lalitk's avatar
lalitk
5,602 posts
 

”The “Olive 4HD” (pretty much all Olive products)”

@designsfx

Olive 4HD, brought back some bitter sweet memories. Started out strong but their ‘closed-in’ operating system and short sightedness, ultimately led to their demise.

mceljo OP
1,357 posts
 

@bigtwin - I took the negative approach because it's hard know if the improvement is a result of truly being real or if it's just different colored by expectation bias.  If someone paid for a product that they expected to be better and found that it wasn't, it seems like expectation bias would not be a factor as the result was the opposite of what was expected.

Ideally, I was looking for responses that said I had a $1000 component and then purchased a $3000 component and found that it wasn't an improvement.

okhunter
7 posts
 

I love all my other Bryston gear (14BSST, BCD-1, BDA-3, BP-26 PRE-AMP) but the interface (Manic Moose) for the BDP-3 Network player is so unappealing to use, that mine has been sitting unused for more than a year.
Instead,  I  have a Yamaha np-s303 network player at 1/10 of the price doing the job. It's app is super easy to use. 
I'm holding on to the Bryston player in the hopes that Bryston Canada will succumb to public preasure and develop and app/interface that is simple to use.  
I know this has been discussed on other threads and on other forums in the past.  I'm just hoping that Mr. Tanner is willing to reopen the topic for further discussion.

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