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.
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?