Don't Believe the Hype! Everything that Glitters Isn't Gold

hey i'm randy and you're watching the cheap audio man here at the cheap audience we talk about high-value hi-fi home theater and headphone equipment and today we're going to talk about the most over-hyped products in hi-fi maybe so sit down grab a cup of coffee let's talk about some over-hyped products [Music] so this video is not necessarily about things that i don't think are good and they're overhyped maybe things that are over saturated but i asked my patrons what they thought was the most over saturated over hyped products out there i'm gonna react to what they wrote i may agree i may disagree but the first one comes from taylor willis i was gonna say bows i was also going to say bose there were some common themes across the comments so i kind of picked the ones that were mentioned the most often bose is an easy target for audio files however i don't think what bose did can be dismissed because what bose did is they basically took the console stereo like our grandparents used to have everybody had it you had a radio you had a turntable you had one piece of furniture and they shrunk it down and they put it in everybody's house even my parents have one of those little bose radios i think there's a cd player in it as well and you can also not dismiss bose's role in multi-channel home theater it made it easy it made it acceptable with the bose cubes the acoustic mass i still have a set of the bose acoustimass and it still works over 20 years now if you're getting into frequency response of course i don't think the goal was to ever have a linear frequency response something that audiophiles would like you also can't dismiss their role in noise-canceling headphones so while i do think bose may not be the right choice for me when it comes to a speaker what they did for the industry is bring people in i would argue that bose is probably responsible for more high-end audio enthusiast audio files even than probably any other brand that has ever existed in the space so while i think maybe they're not great i think as a company they've done more for the industry than anybody else all right buff one of my boys from patreon at the risk of being flamed lossless audio there is sound science behind psychoacoustic compression take this test from npr as i have to see if you can really tell the difference on your system i've actually done that and i've taken that test i've actually mentioned that in other videos i'll put it in the description and you can try it out for yourself to be clear there are rare people with a golden ear that can tell the difference but they are very rare i took this little test and i was not 100 right all of the time i also before the channel ever started i was playing around with amazon hd music and i was comparing it directly to spotify the test was doomed to fail from the very beginning because i was having to switch headphones change apps and things like that so being able to quickly a b things on the same headphones was nearly impossible when i really really really really leaned in i thought i could hear a bit of a difference between amazon hd and spotify now there's fundamental problems with that a b test because well sometimes i think certain streaming services actually put a little bit of their own little magic sauce on the music anyway but the proof is in the pudding and i think everyone should click on that link and go take the test for themselves and see if they can hear a difference because it's not just 320 kilobits versus lossless i think there's a 120 kilobit track in there too pretty low resolution compared to lossless audio personally i listen to amazon hd and title the most that's just what i do i like titles music discovery tool i think they do i think they have very good suggestions when it comes to the music that i like but i think buff has a huge point here i think the need for lossless audio is probably not as significant as most people would think however i think the industry is going in that direction and spotify is king i think other people are trying to differentiate themselves to get some of that market share away from spotify but if you've noticed they still haven't gone fully lossless because they probably don't need to it probably has zero impact on their bottom line so why as a company would you spend a whole bunch of money to go lossless when the people that care about lossless audio are infinitesimal compared to their total customer base but i still listen to lossless music and i think everybody that's watching this video should go check out that link and see if they can hear any difference on their own systems to be fair on higher end super clear systems it's easier to hear a difference in my experience put on your headphones that have the most clarity the most detailed retrieval and go take that test see if you can get it right so trevor has a whole list of stuff overpriced for performance name martin logan kef ls50 slash meta elac certain models b6 treble bloat bass riga high end cables audio technica headphones whoa i'll start with the one that i have the most experience with and that's the kef ls50 i watched youtube before i ever thought about starting a channel and that was one of the speakers that was on my list and i eventually got that speaker i found a very nice pair of used kef ls50s which there's always kef ellis 50s on the used market that should have been my first clue the argument with the kef ls50 is that it needs the right amplification that if you don't have the right amplifier with it then you're not going to get the most out of that speaker i think that argument could be made for any and every speaker out there but not any and every speaker has to have that argument because they already sound good i found the kef ls50s to be too forward and lacking any sort of bass i didn't find them to sound natural at all i compared them it was one of my first videos i did i compared them to the rp 600m and the elac debut reference i ended up selling the kef ls50 to finance more products to bring in for the channel i agree here with trevor especially on the kef ls50s to be fair i haven't heard any name equipment any martin logan equipment i do have a ton of experience with elac the b6 that is going to be probably not a speaker for everyone but what that speaker did was soundstage an image like nothing i'd ever heard before and it also had so much bass presence and that that's probably what he's talking about is the bloat bass there was another comment about another elac model the b6.2 about that being over hyped and not very good i agree i own that speaker three times and i returned it three times to be fair they sent me a 5.2 by accident so i had six point twos twice and the five point twos i didn't like that speaker i felt like it really deviated from the b6 it was too forward i don't think it had enough bass with the six point twos they swung the pendulum all the way to the other side and it didn't have the magic that the original b6's had riga i have zero experience with riga high-end cables i really have i have a little bit of experience but yeah i think those are overpriced over hyped audio technica headphones i do have the m 50 i think it's the one that everybody has and yes i think they're probably over hyped at at the cost for studio monitors for doing podcasts and things like that i think they're fine i have not listened to those for music in years years they do have some excitement on top but for music yeah i think they're way over hyped matt k just two words triangle borborius the bros as they're more commonly referred to i couldn't agree more i didn't like the bro3s let me let me take that back it's not that i didn't like the bro3s i just didn't think they were as good as other speakers like the klipsch rp 600m or the elac debut reference which i compared them directly to at the beginning of the channel when i bought them because nobody was sending me stuff nobody was sending me anything so i bought everything and what i heard was a lack of clarity on the bro3s i think they looked good i thought they were really overpriced the irony is here that if you go and you try to look up a triangle speaker it is selling for significantly less than what it used to sell for with inflation so i would say that the triangle bro 3s especially were overhyped and not as good as some other speakers that were priced similarly now that they're less expensive they actually might be a better value but back then no not at all growth rates were good but definitely not great tyler cheeseman coming in with a hot take two items that fit this category that i'm guilty of purchasing due to hype jennifer series 2 and sennheiser hd 650. hmm all right i gotta close the computer on this one so the denniford series 2 i love and it has been reviewed a lot it's my favorite deck it really is through headphones though the denifrep's ares 2 is not at its best for me the denifrep series 2 is at its best when it's in a 2 channel system with speakers because it's soundstage it's imaging it's layering that i just don't hear when i'm on headphones because i have done a direct comparison between the denafrap series 2 the skit bifrost 2 and the topping something 90 sc very expensive those dacks all came in at a similar price at the time actually the topping was the most expensive and i thought the least impressive deck out of the bunch i did all that testing through headphones though and the similarities were pretty tight on headphones however when i put them on speakers i could definitely start to hear the differences and those differences were in spatial placement more than anything else a little bit of reverb i think there's a little bit of second order harmonics going on in the identifiers aries too not too dissimilar from a tube amplifier love tyler cheeseman however i'm going to disagree on the den of rep series 2 because i love it i think in certain applications one is not going to hear the magic of the denifred series 2. he is only the second person though that i've talked to in my little group my patron community that hasn't liked it or has sold it most folks really really like that deck as far as the hd 650 i don't really have any experience with that i have experience with a 6xx from sennheiser and i think that's the same headphone or based on the same headphone i like it i mean i don't do backflips over it i think it's got great mid-range but at the price i think the 6x is still a great buy and i think even if you're not into that sound signature because it's such a high value it's something nice to have in the collection because it does give a different vibe a different take on the music so i do like the 6xx but not necessarily for rock and roll more acoustic vocal centric type of tracks i think it's amazing but if i'm rocking out to some metallica some disturbed it's probably not through the 6xx billy d gray says i vote for more discussion on interconnect cables speaker cables power cables oh boy oh boy what a hornet's nest this is probably the most divisive topic in all of audio at least from my perspective when i look at other channels when i look at discussion forums things like that there's a camp that says cables make a difference and there's people that i trust that say cables make a difference i believe them there's people that say cables make zero difference they have zero impact on the sound i believe them really whatever works for you i personally choose cables from the world's best cables for interconnects and they're rca i think they're made from canary wire whatever it is i use it really for cheap insurance and it's not super cheap they're about thirty dollars a pair for rcas and that's about double what i would pay with amazon basics cables which i use a lot of as well but i use them because they're built better and if there is any sonic improvement you know i'm willing to take that chance for thirty dollars i haven't heard any magic cables in my experience actually i got sent a pair of very good cables from one of my patrons and i use they're very heavy duty they're so heavy duty that they kind of tweak some of the connections on my receiver i think some of these really heavy duty expensive cables can actually cause harm not necessarily from a sonic perspective at all but just from how beefy they are i think it puts strain on my receiver i'd rather i'd rather just have a homemade pair of speaker cables that i made in my patreon community the overwhelming thought process behind cables is that interconnects play more of a role in sound characteristic changes now don't shoot the messenger here i'm just telling you what they've told me and i know i'll probably get some flack for this but i have heard a difference in interconnect cables i haven't done any crazy a b tests but i hooked up a pair of cables one time and i i don't even remember what they are i think they were homemade cables that were sent in from one of my patrons and i was like oh that sounds more clear sounds a little bit more airy that's been my only experience with cable sonic differences now that's purely anecdotal because i wasn't even doing an a b test i think there may be some merit to interconnect cables xlrs rcas but i'm not willing to put my name on it quite yet so this was a lot of fun if you want to support the channel you can use my affiliate links in the description you can sign up for patreon you can sign up for amazon music or title music so don't binge watch anything on netflix or hulu binge listen and fill your soul with happiness and with that i'm randy i'm the cheap audio man [Music] you

Channel: cheapaudioman

Views: 200,507

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Id: nvzC23KNtPs

Length: 15min 19sec (919 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 13 2022