The most overrated kit?

I wouldnt want to comment on sound quality, its a very personal thing, and what will justify a budget for one person wont for another (I think they're worth the hype, but there we go )

I just wanted to point out that I dont believe the scanspeak revelator on the OBX, or the scanspeak tweeter on the avatar is available on any loundspeaker with a lower RRP than the LV speakers. I believe some Proac's use the revelator, but they are more expensive speakers.

The boxes may appear ordinary, but the dearer models use a form of bracing (dowel and tennon I think its called) which isnt seen in most speakers due to cost and the fact that its a pig to work with (so says LV supremo Kevin Scott). This makes for exceptionally rigid cabinets.

Im not convinced that rounding the baffle edges would improve the loudspeaker. Maybe its been tried and rejected, or not tried at all. Who knows. It sounds excellent in my view as it is.

No commercially available speaker can be measured by the cost of components used IMHO. How about a pair of Wilson X-1,s some 100,000 worth of speaker with about 5,000 worth of bits? The same rings true for every speaker, with companies like Wilmslow Audio offering exact ATC active copies for 1/2 their RRP, as another example.

In terms of manufacturing cost vs retail price, speakers dont stand up well. Interconnects and power cords appear even worse of course!

Just a few thoughts.

 

yeah,,I know,they were fine with my old speakers,but the Audio Physics just didnt like them anywhere near as much as the Isolda,

 

I have auditioned several of the highly regarded 500 series CD players over the years - 508.20, 506, 588 etc and found all of them pretty boring and closed in.....

But the G07 I tried a few months ago was superb - now seriously considering it again after my disappointment with the MF Trivista 21 DAC.

 

Agree with PBirkett here - I've heard a number of pairs of Mission speakers and the majority have sounded very good to me. To some extent, as a Mission owner, I could be biased, but the only pair that didn't sound bad (to my cloth ears), were at Bristol this year and these were partnered with Naim kit. Sounded terribly shrill and shouty to me.

But - in the Ruark room, the Naim and Ruark combination sounded superb - a combination I could easily live with if I had the cash! So the point is, to a great extent, it's about careful matching/synergy.

 

The DAC64 overrated? No way . It is simply the best digital source there is, end of story :MILD: - and that's not sarcasm, it's the truth

Michael.

 

:ffrc: :ffrc: :boughtMF: :lol: :notworthy :NADowner:

Prehaps it's a little hotter in Portgual than in the UK mike, and the sunstroke has got to you early this year

 

OK, OK, perhaps I've been a little hard on Living Voice. They are good speakers and looking at their immediate competition (at each of the three price points in the range) they don't stack up too badly for what they can do.

I think the real problem is that the law of diminishing returns sets in with breathtaking speed for loudspeakers above a certain price. Not sure what that price is but suspect it's no more than about £2000.

 

I think its one of the best DAC's Ive heard, and a splendid second hand buy.

Like I said before though, I dont think that there is a right or wrong when expressing personal preferences

 

Chris,

This is an over-rated thread, not its a load bollox thread

 

And to think I used to accuse you of lacking a sense of humour on occasions Michael!

 

same thing though surely?..

i mean if its vastly overated at its price point, that states implicitly that other products at the same price point are much better.

...cant think of a better description of crap than its easily bettered by equally/lower priced goods

 

I think living voice stuff is over priced like most things personally, though I do like the quality.

I had a look inside the avatar obx's once, the bracing is 4 pieces of square dowel glued to the inside, rather like a kind of picture frame if you imagine viewing from the top down.

This is done 3x, so there are 3 braces.

My how people put a marketing spin on a few bits of wood

Breakdown of LV costs:

Audiotorium:

vifa c17wg 69-08 2 off each speaker : £35 each.
vifa d25tg -35-06 1 off £25

chipboard, veneer, and simple 2nd order crossover.

pretty cheap ingredients, proac use dearer stuff for less.

Avatar, tweeter is scanspeak 9500 £75

for the extra tweeter, and slightly more expensive bass units+ a hovland or 2 in the crossover, you pay a cool £1000

on obx, revelator £150

both woofers are vifa c17wh-09 08

£no more than £40 each.

cabinet has 12 pieces of dowel inside.

for a box of wood, (outboard xover) containing some good components and £75 more for the tweeter, you pay a cool £1500.

still a materially cheap speaker, with a monster markup.

I still like the ethos, though.

herr scott is making a tidy sum.

dac64 not crap, well made, good technology, and not dear for what you get I suppose.
just really was over hyped, I liked naim cdi better, more natural, almost my perfect cd player. full spec. eikos very close, 50/50 between it and naim, I would take the naim.
I haven't found much to better the marantz ki 63, naim & co excepted.
Thing about dac 64 is, a audio alchemy 1.1, not 3.0 was as 'huge' monster dac. all for £100 tad grainy, but only compared with the best. easily live with. That's what I look at, cost for what you get.

 

Thats marketing for you Chris (although you used the word vastly, the most expensive item in the 64 is the cam case itself I believe
In your second point you mean like the Cal-dac, which is a far more complete sound for about 1/3 of the priced used?
Is that the sort of analagy you mean ?
Or the Benchmark dac1 at £600 to the door?
Over-rated to me means Not crap or bad, just whats all the fuss about aka a Wadia 302

Data,

You need to fill your time with something constructive, considering writing a book,

'Audio cons' the low-down all this information you dig, its fascinating, put it to some use

 

Data, good post, sums up precisely why my next pair of speakers will be DIY. Looks like I could build a pair of OBX-R's for about £1000. That's only £70 more than my Castles cost

 

Unrepentant for my sins I've proudly owned late 80's/early 90's Audiolab amps and would own again given the chance. Can't speak for early samples of the 8000A though as I've never heard one, if that's what most folks on this thread are basing their opinons on then by judging most other reports I've read the early Audiolab amp did somewhat have a reputation for being a bit sterile.

Oh, and given a budget of upto £1500 to spend on a t/t, I'd go for Gyrodeck everytime too.

Now, my nomination for the most overrate piece of kit of all time... The Audionote Ongaku amp, truly overpriced, overhyped and overrated. IMHO of course...

 

Guys,

I agree with the comments that a lot of products out there are overrated & hyped out of all proportion - one reason why I refuse to buy into the so-called "ultra high-end". I work hard for my money to just fritter it away on products that do not justify their cost prices. In terms of loudspeakers, the description "ordinary looking" applies to the vast majority of them, not just Living Voice speakers. Too many speakers out there look like upright caskets with no imagination having gone into their outward designs although they may sound good.

Overrated & overpriced pieces of gear for me are - Origin Live Silver tonearm, Pathos Logos amp, Mark Levinson amps, Wilson Watt-Puppy loudspeakers - all of them.

Technobear - a lot of my friends (yes, I still have a few of those left) are into the DIY loudspeaker scene using all the quality Scanspeak, Revelator, Vifa etc tweeters & drivers that many loudspeaker manufacturers use. One of them has just finished buliding the speakers in the following link and they sound superb for the costs involved so the DIY route is worth a stab. http://www.visaton.com/cgi/VisatonFramed.asp?Sprache=english&Artikel_ID=733

One thing though - your comparison of the cost of the LV OBX-Rs & your Castles is uneven. You are comparing the costs of self build vs retail. What you should be comparing are the costs to self-build the Castles vs the costs to self build the LVs.



Enjoy the music,

Lawrie.

 

Hi,

Interesting thread.


What is the most overated kit?


I would say most new hifi. All companies make claims on how much better their stuff is but alot isn't or is just different. You can always, as long as you got the skills & equipment, build it/diy for a lot cheaper &/or better.

Hyping stuff is a very good way of getting interest & publicty for a product. It happens in nearly every field of life. The music industry, fashion industry, computer industry, car industry etc etc. Hyping helps to sell items. Sell enough items and you should (hopefully) make a profit. This is not to say that hyped item wouldn't sell otherwise but every little bit helps.

It is easy to knock people who sell stuff that has components which are cheap. But hifi is a small industry & a lot of these companies are small. You need to look at the full costings. Design, research & development, market reasearch, distrubution, marketing, wages, bills, rents/mortages, profit, dealers margins, tax mans cut etc all need to be marked in. The cost will vary from company to company. It is not always an equal playing field.

In the case of Living Voice, I agree with Lawrie the cost of DIY v ready built will vary widely. Also this range is part built(or fully built) by Castle loudspeakers in the UK. Speakers like Quad & others are now made in China so the cost is a lot cheaper.

Comparisons between items are always interesting but not every thing is on an equal footing. If Benchmark Dac1 which can be bought from the states from around £600 to £700. If it was imported by a company for the UK market, it wouldn't sell for £600 to £700. It would go on the UK market maybe at a similar or more price than the Chord Dac64. A lot of US stuff is half price or more cheaper in the US than UK. Price differences can make things seem over hyped. Just look at the price of alot of overseas items.

Having said all this, there are examples of companies charging over the odds. A number of items are priced at what the market will stand.

SCIDB

 

Hi data, the speaker you refer to is the auditorium. This has recently been increased from 1,500 to 1,700. This has the 12 pieces of window frame style bracing inside the box. This is what most speaker manufacturers do.

OBX's and my avatars (which unusually have OBX bracing) have a different sort of bracing. Easiest way to explain it is to refer to a battering ram. If you imagine 3 battering rams shoved between opposing walls going down the cabinet, you can see why it would be a stiffer cabinet and harder to work round.

In regard to Kevins profit, you must realise that most of his sales are through a distributor. You therefore have the distributors costs and the shops own sale mark up to take into account.

I stand by Living Voice speakers being at least equitable if not better than their counterparts in cost/money stakes.

Castle do make the cabinets, from a thick quality ply. A lot of manufacturers at this price point are still using cheaper, thinner, (and IMO worse) MDF.

Like Wadia Meister said, its a beautiful case. Casework aside, the internals probably dont cost much at all. Im sure WM could say how much, but as ever its the implementation thats hard to forge Its not to say its not an excellent product, just like any hifi component its manufacturing cost is a fraction of the final selling price.

 

Indeed. I suspect that to build the Castles would still cost me about £400 - 500. So the difference DIY is around £500 while the difference retail is around £3000. Somebody's making hay

 

Also, don't forget that the DAC64 isn't (like 99% of DACs out there) just a bunch of off the shelf components (including off the shelf DAC chip) slung together. It's a totally proprietary algorithm implemented in FPGAs which has nothing to do with your common as muck Crystal, Cirrus, Wolfson, Burr Brown etc off the shelf chips.

Like software, that kind of algorithm isn't developed for free

Compared to other products at a similar price point there's really nothing that can compete.

Michael.