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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
antialiased's avatar
antialiased
43 posts
 

Recently, I decided to try out a AmpliD Modern Class D amp from Pathos. Had high hopes that it would take me to the next plane of audiophila, but it was not to be. Class D might have come along way, but to my ears I didn’t like the sound of it. It’s a very clean studio sound and while I couldn’t say it was bad it was just super dry sounding with sharper edges which was not to my preference. The bass was stronger and the sound was overall more forward. Some might prefer that type of sound, but I didn’t, so I’ve decided to stick with AB. That said, it did work great for cinema though.

The straw that broke the camels back was that I was running the amp via unbalanced single ended preout from an AV Receiver. That generated a hum I wasn’t keenly aware of the listening position but had an impact on the sound. It wasn’t until one day, I happened to get close to the right speaker whilst watering a plant that I heard the hum. Immediately sent it back to the retailer.

52356
24 posts
 

Audio Research pre amps

ericsch
756 posts
 

Parasound JC3+, noisy in my system and no gain adjustment. Replaced it with a Pass XP-15 and later with a Modwright PH 9.0X, both dead quiet.

 

edcyn
1,876 posts
 

I still bear a grudge against Mytek (both the maker and the internet site I bought it from) for not giving me even a trace of accommodation when my Brooklyn Streamer/DAC/Phono Amp died pretty much the day it went out of warranty.  And, damn, the thing sounded good! On the other side of the ledger, my Electrocompaniet preamp/phono stage did indeed last a very decent amount of time past its warranty coverage. So I can't really complain. For a while I replaced it with the preamp portion of my NAD integrated amp. In any event, I'm now leery of all Class A transistor gear. By contrast, when a tube goes dead you can easily mail order another one. And when I lived in L.A. there were several places around town that kept a variety of tubes in stock. They were fun places to visit, too.

mglik
911 posts
 

ARC Ref 80S amp.

Sold to me as being “a match made in heaven” for my Quad 57s.

Not

No question that it is an excellent amp, but heavy handed with the Quads.

And I never felt any time a suspension of disbelief.

Just fatiguing on highs and high volume.

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