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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

Showing 1 response by panzrwagn

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panzrwagn
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KEF LS-50s - just all wrong in my room. They are a near field monitor for small rooms. In my living room, they just sounded tiny and lost, even with a sub. Replaced them with Monitor Audio Silver 300 7G, and am very happy. The LS-50s will go into a second system in a smaller room.

My VPI Scout was originally ordered with a Grado Sonata 3 from Music Direct. Supposedly preinstalled, aligned, and tested. Not only was the installation alignment visibly horribly wrong, the tracking force clearly had not been set, and to top it all off, the Grado hummed as badly as any badly grounded device ever. Music Direct's response was great, swapped the Grado for a Hana SH, which I installed and aligned myself. As for the VPI, other than an initially sticky cuing  damper, it has been flawless. Horror stories about unipivot arm setup are mostly urban myth and the low tracking error of the 10.5" 3D printed arm suits the Shibata stylus well. Very happy now.

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