“Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting

There's a sweet spot for electronics. I got a pair of €7 Bluetooth earbuds, with a mic. Sound quality was good enough to listen to podcast, but not music, the mic didn't work well enough for phone calls, and they lasted maybe 3 months. After that I bought a pair for 6-7 times the price, but I had those for 4 years now, to their clearly the better investment long term.

*__exactly__*

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If you have ever whore'd yourself out as a 1099 "consultant" <=== you're typically paid ~30% of bill rate... the company claimed all this "I have to pay insurance" bullshit - but if you are paid $50 an hour, the contract is likely $150 an hour... and the company's fat margins are within....

I'm confused. So were they actually good speakers to begin with, or was it the measurement device + tuning that made bad speakers sound good? Mind sharing the brand of speaker?

The problem with audio in general is that its really difficult to find decent reviews of the product.

I used to work as a tech in a recording studio (along with a theatre and TV studio) We have a set of nearfield speakers, and that was about it.

However audio reviews are basically:

"Its got punchy bass" and "sounds a bit woolly" or "has brilliant clarity in the upper regions" are about as descriptive as review get.

Not only that but "high end" audio is replete with proper charlatanism. Without trying the devices, its impossible to assess how good they are.

personally, I have a second hand denon HDMI decoder thing, with airplay. I have some cheap surround speakers. The thing that separates it from "high end" amplifiers is that it has a microphone to add some basic DSP filtering during a calibration stage. It gives a decent flat reproduction of what's coming into the amp (ie its not mid or treble heavy), and cost about £250 all in (the amp was second hand)

A few years ago I decided to move up from what I'd call "good consumer" receivers to something high(er)-end. So I shelled out $1400 for an NAD A/V receiver.

This thing is unmitigated trash. It's riddled with design defects and bugs that render it unfit for purpose, some of which are acknowledged by NAD but with no solution. For example: You can't watch 1080p content through it because it reports incorrect EDID info to the source player, saying that the max resolution of the display device is 720p.

Another: Dirac audio processing is well-regarded by many to fix room acoustics, so that was a major factor in the purchase. Welp, the NADs will simply "lose" or stop using your laboriously-sampled Dirac EQ curve at random. Another defect admitted by NAD, but "we don't know why it happens."

An authorized repair guy said NAD simply contracts out their designs, and the gear is often built by a hodgepodge of suppliers out of low-grade components. This was after driving two sets of speakers from one set of terminals apparently caused on over-current condition... which didn't throw a circuit breaker or blow a fuse, but rather destroyed the entire amplifier and rendered the receiver permanently inoperable unless the main board was replaced. Brilliant design.

I have replaced it with a Pioneer, which only suffers from one insufferably stupid design flaw that I've discovered so far (also shared by the NAD): You can't play digital sources through secondary zones ("zone 2" speakers). I mean... WTF.