Most overrated audio manufacturers?

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.

Judyazblues,

I don't know about Atma-Sphere amps only being suitable for 5% of speakers. The odds were not on my side when I bought my Raidho C1.1 speakers. But my Atma-Sphere S-30 drives my Raidho speakers to perfection -- with the Paul Speltz auto-transformers added. I have at least 50 db. headroom on most recordings with my PS Audio DirectStream DAC that has a gain of at least 10 db. If you add the Paul Speltz auto-transformers to your system the Atma-Sphere amp should have enough power to drive most mid to low sensitivity speakers, IMHO. There are 3 settings on the auto-transformer and I use the lowest setting.

But I do agree with you about Synergistic Research cables. IMO, they should limit themselves to the tweak business, which looks like the direction they are heading.

I would add a number of other cables makers to Synergistic Research in the the BIG CABLE YAWN category: ASI Liveline, Cardas, Gabriel Gold, Grover Huffman, HiDiamond, Kimber, Mogami and Pangea -- among others.