10 HIFI and HOME THEATER Purchases I REGRET

Not every hifi or home theater purchase we make is a home run. Here’s a list of my 10 worst hifi and home theater purchases I’ve made that I 100% regret and hope to never make again.

Top 10 Hifi & Home Theater Regrets by Andrew Robinson

10. SACD Players

When SACD first hit the market in the late 90’s I was convinced of its superiority over CDs and thus my NEED for it. I didn’t care that there seemed to be little to no support for the format, either by way of players or discs featuring music I actually wanted to listen to. None of this stopped me, as I purchased three SACD players over the course of 5 or so years; each one more expensive than the last –because the problem couldn’t have possibly been the format and its lack of mass market appeal, it had to be my player –because that’s how audiophile logic works. Needless to say, I spent a small fortune on the format only to sell it all for pennies on the dollar some years later.

9. HD DVD

Now this one I think is a little more understandable for any of you who may remember the format wars between HD DVD and Blu-ray some years ago. I bought into HD DVD and heavily, as I thought it was the clear choice over DVD. It was open source, mildly less expensive and in terms of marketing, played off of a format that was already ubiquitous in the marketplace, which was DVD. I mean, what’s better than a DVD? A High Def DVD, DUH? Anyway, the logic made sense to me and I invested heavily into the format (along with Blu-ray for the record) only to end up with a house full of component-shaped door stops and drink coasters when Sony effectively ended the format wars by paying studios to side with Blu-ray over HD DVD.

8. Blu-ray

You thought Blu-ray was about to escape my wrath, didn't you? Sorry, nope. Because I was the managing editor of the largest online home theater publication at the time I had to have both HD DVD and Blu-ray players in my home in order to talk about the format and what it meant for you, the reader. Problem was, in the early goings of Blu-ray, players were exceedingly hard to come by. Sony wasn’t sending out press samples, so I bought mine at full retail, same as you, oftentimes having to overpay in order to make sure I got the latest player. While this is not a new practice for me, what sucked about those first gen Blu-ray players was, they were about as reliable as Pontiac Fiero with 200,000 miles on the odometer. I purchased, no joke, four Sony BDP-S1 players at a cost of well over a grand each only to have each one fail within the first year of ownership. And that’s just one sku of Blu-ray player. In total I believe I’ve owned well over a dozen players of which only ONE remains.

7. Cable Lifts

Imagine going to your local Chinese food restaurant and grabbing a handful of chopsticks. Now go home and take those chopsticks, break them apart and make a half dozen tripods out of them. Now rest your speaker cables on top of them so they’re up and off your floor. Now imagine spending hundreds of dollars for pre-made cable tripods like those you just constructed for free. Feel like an idiot yet? I did. Do cable lifts look silly? Yep. Do they work or produce any real, perceivable results? Nope.

6. High-end Cables

Trigger warning, but I regret pretty much every high-end audio or video cable purchase I have ever made. In the heat of the moment I ALWAYS heard a difference, but after a week or two…? Without fail I would grab my old cables and plug them back in and minus (maybe) a slight change in SPL, there was little to no difference in sound quality. Then, much later in life, I started to cut open some of my high-end cables to discover that underneath their fancy sheeting and terminations rested much of the same bulk OFC wire I had been buying for about a dollar a foot, opposed to the often hundreds and sometimes even thousands of dollars per foot some of my high-end cables commanded. And don’t even get me started about some of the BS surrounding some digital cables –especially digital video cables.

If you want to make your own speaker cables like me, here is everything you need to do it yourself. Need HDMI cables for home theater use? This is what I typically use.

5. Isolation Products

This is bound to get me in a heap of trouble, but I think expensive isolation products are mostly BS. Sure, they may produce measurable results in a lab or when using specific tools, but I have yet to hear a plinth of wood, carbon fiber or what have you completely transform the sound of any component, let alone my system. THE ONLY TIME an isolation product has worked for me– is with respect to bass. I had some Auralex platforms under my JL Audio subs at one point and their presence cut down on vibrations being transmitted to my floor, which I appreciated and my neighbors no doubt did too, but did it change the way the sub sounded in every day listening…eh, maybe? To be fair, those Auralex platforms were a few hundred dollars, which isn’t nothing, but still a far cry from what SOME isolation products command. Needless to say, I’ve been able to achieve the same end result using washing machine pucks, which you can pick up for relative pennies in comparison.

4. HiFi Mods

I don’t see many companies specializing in modifications nowadays but back in the 90s and early 2000s there were more than a few. And these “companies” promised to take components that cost a few hundred dollars and completely transform them into reference-beating high-end machines. All you needed to do was buy the original product, send it to them, along with an extra stack of cash, and let them get to work. And these companies would modify damn near anything. You want a tube-based Blu-ray player? There’s a mod for that. Got a Playstation 1 lying around collecting dust, let’s turn it into a $20,000-besting transport. You get the idea. I tried one of these once. I had a tube output stage created for one of my early Oppo players and you know what…I ended up with a player with some tubes sticking out of the top resulting in no real difference in its performance. If anything, my once rackable Oppo now had to be shuffled around in order to allow for the added real estate needed to provide proper cooling to the tubes. Such a deal.

3. Expensive Projector Screens

Let’s make one thing clear, projector screens can get pricey on their own without needing to buy into marketing BS. The larger the screen, the more expensive they are to make and ship. When you start considering motorized options, you can move into high dollar territory pretty quickly. But this isn’t what I’m talking about when referring to expensive screens. I’m talking about paying for screens that are color neutral or better yet, ISF certified. I’m talking about screens that are rated for 8K. Those types of screens. Here’s the unvarnished truth about projection screens. First, any flat surface that you can project on that is NOT acoustically transparent is rated for HD, 4K, hell even 8,000K. Your garage door is 8K-ready should you want to project onto that. As for screens claiming to be color neutral? That’s great and all, but calibrating a projection system takes into account three key factors; the projector, your room and THE SCREEN. This is precisely why it’s possible to calibrate a projector to a white screen the same as you can to a gray one. If you choose to fully calibrate your projector to your room and screen, any slight shift in color caused by the screen would otherwise be dealt with in a proper calibration. In other words buy the screen you can afford from a brand you trust, ignore single percentage point differences in color variation or resolution claims and save your money for a proper calibration.

2. Acoustic Products

Okay, before you throw your phone or laptop out the window in disgust, I am NOT saying acoustic products are bad. I am saying that it is very easy to OVER BUY when it comes to acoustic products –something I have done many, MANY times. And if you think selling off high-end hifi or home theater products is hard, try unloading a room’s worth of acoustic treatments. At one point, I couldn’t even give away some of the panels I had left over after I realized I had gone too far!

We recently built our own acoustic treatments in our new home. You can check that video out here!

1. BUILDING A Dedicated Home Theater Room

When I bought my first home back in LA, I specifically looked for space that would allow me to have a purpose-built, dedicated home theater. After all, everyone I ran into at CEDIA or CES drilled into my head what a good investment a home theater was when it came time to sell your home. Spoiler alert, it’s not. If anything, it ranks among the worst investments I have ever made. My screening room cost upwards of $75,000 and that did not include the cost of gear, much of which I was able to acquire at cost or at an industry accommodation given my role as a managing editor. All in all, my first dedicated home theater cost nearly six figures when everything was said and done and for that money, the room sat largely unused. I’m not saying I NEVER watched a movie or held a screening in the space, but it was not a space I used regularly, as in every day or even every week.

When it came time to sell, THE FIRST thing buyers would ask was whether or not the theater could be removed and turned into a livable space prior to closing. Not one prospective buyer asked for the theater to stay, I even lost out on a sale when I said I wouldn’t pay to turn the room into a regular old bedroom or office. In the end I ended up taking the whole room apart and selling everything on Audiogon for whatever I could get, which added up to about $12,000 when everything was said and done. In other words, my “investment” resulted in a nearly 90 percent loss –oh, and that was all within about three years, which is how long I lived in my first house.

So that’s it, that wraps up my top 10 hifi and home theater purchases that I regret making! Chime in with your biggest hifi and home theater regrets by commenting on the video here!

10 HIFI and HOME THEATER Purchases I REGRET THE MOST