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Cynical "hi-fi" marketing -- even at the low end!
jjne
Posts: 6,580 Forum Member
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(Moved from GD)
We all know the stories about £500 ethernet cables, and £200 HDMI cables and so-on, and yes it is a total rip-off. People who buy these are fools unto themselves and deserve little sympathy.
However I've just uncovered a hidden gem here, which is far more cynical IMO as it's exploiting people who just want to buy something reasonable that's better than the basic stereo system. It's a separates CD player.
These are sold by a company called "TiBO", and I think the same players are sold by Acoustic Solutions and others.
They retail at around £100 -- so the same sort of money that Richer Sounds will take off you in exchange for a well-built, Japanese-designed CD player with a robust transport and decent sound quality etc. Except these things are sold in the chains (Brighthouse, John Lewis etc).
I will point out that I bought this as a refurb from eBay for a fiver, but to be honest even at that price I feel a little ripped off lol.
Take the top off, and what do I find? This thing isn't a hifi CD player at all. It's the cheapest of the cheap Chinese DVD players, worth all of £15, but put into an (admittedly very nice) metal case with brushed aluminium front etc.
The power supply is junk. The mechanism is junk. The (tiny) main circuit board, the same one they put in the Tesco Value CD player, is a standard cheapie thing. I queried this with the manufacturer, and more lies flowed -- this "very low distortion, excellent SNR yada yada" board has had its audio stage "improved", so they say.
Err, no it hasn't. You've just removed all the video/audio etc outputs from the back of the module and tapped the headphone output, and wired that straight to the phono jacks with a couple of resistors and capacitors. WTF?
This is beyond a joke. I'd actually suggest that this thing sounds worse than the ultra-cheap piece of crap it was based on. And they have the bare-faced nerve to charge £100 for it?!?
The only good thing about it is that the chipset (a MediaTek) buffers the digital signal in memory, so the digital outputs on these are high quality (but even then they've removed the digital output -- no doubt to sell that as a "feature" on the £150 model lol) as the jitter level is low.
So I can probably salvage this by putting in a £20 DAC board I have lying around and use the (nice) case as the case for this new DAC. There's so much free space in the case I can put loads of junk in there.
So, be warned. It's not just cables, or the £3000 CD players that are a rip-off. This is actually pretty funny.
We all know the stories about £500 ethernet cables, and £200 HDMI cables and so-on, and yes it is a total rip-off. People who buy these are fools unto themselves and deserve little sympathy.
However I've just uncovered a hidden gem here, which is far more cynical IMO as it's exploiting people who just want to buy something reasonable that's better than the basic stereo system. It's a separates CD player.
These are sold by a company called "TiBO", and I think the same players are sold by Acoustic Solutions and others.
They retail at around £100 -- so the same sort of money that Richer Sounds will take off you in exchange for a well-built, Japanese-designed CD player with a robust transport and decent sound quality etc. Except these things are sold in the chains (Brighthouse, John Lewis etc).
I will point out that I bought this as a refurb from eBay for a fiver, but to be honest even at that price I feel a little ripped off lol.
Take the top off, and what do I find? This thing isn't a hifi CD player at all. It's the cheapest of the cheap Chinese DVD players, worth all of £15, but put into an (admittedly very nice) metal case with brushed aluminium front etc.
The power supply is junk. The mechanism is junk. The (tiny) main circuit board, the same one they put in the Tesco Value CD player, is a standard cheapie thing. I queried this with the manufacturer, and more lies flowed -- this "very low distortion, excellent SNR yada yada" board has had its audio stage "improved", so they say.
Err, no it hasn't. You've just removed all the video/audio etc outputs from the back of the module and tapped the headphone output, and wired that straight to the phono jacks with a couple of resistors and capacitors. WTF?
This is beyond a joke. I'd actually suggest that this thing sounds worse than the ultra-cheap piece of crap it was based on. And they have the bare-faced nerve to charge £100 for it?!?
The only good thing about it is that the chipset (a MediaTek) buffers the digital signal in memory, so the digital outputs on these are high quality (but even then they've removed the digital output -- no doubt to sell that as a "feature" on the £150 model lol) as the jitter level is low.
So I can probably salvage this by putting in a £20 DAC board I have lying around and use the (nice) case as the case for this new DAC. There's so much free space in the case I can put loads of junk in there.
So, be warned. It's not just cables, or the £3000 CD players that are a rip-off. This is actually pretty funny.
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Comments
As regards your thread title, this is nothing new. I remember back in the mid 70s, when I first got into Hi-Fi, there were plenty of culprits then, so really nothing has changed. This says more about how we as a nation allow industry sectors to manipulate rather than protect, vulnerable and uninformed consumers, than the cynicism of the retailers.
But if people want to buy a £3000 CD player why shouldn't they?
Any why is it a "rip-off"?
The other main issue is that if you are buying Hi-Fi from Brighthouse then I think sound quality is a very low priority on your list. If this CD player sells for £150 in that store chain then I think the price reflects the high likelihood that the credit agreement will be welched on. It looks like Amazon sells the same product for £49, and the customer reviews tell the story well enough. LINK
To be fair the people going in their are to blame just as much. Other than a house, if you can't afford it outright, don't buy it.
Very true - but some people must have their 50" TVs!
If the pictures and details of the components are correct then I could probably knock up something pretty much identical for 20-30 quid!
And the internals of the bit of wood the case is made out of didn't look that high quality either. I'm no carpenter but I bet I could do just as good a job!
So either the images I found were a con or the makers of that device are laughing all the way to the bank.
A lot of hi-fi gear is like this.
You're paying for the hours of audio engineering, replacing and replacing components until the 'right' sound is found, or at least this is what a lot of the smaller companies claim to do.
Almost all headphone amps consist of one or two op-amps plus ancilliaries.
I've been through a few of them (bought second-hand and then sold back on) and ironically the best I've found is a flashy-but-cheap valve amp on ebay (commonly available for £20 or so from Chinese suppliers). These seem to be able to drive my AKGs much better than the standard 5532-in-a-box you pay £250 for normally. Yeah there's a bit of valve distortion but it's a small price to pay.
CD players are the same -- a lot of Marantz players in the 90s were nothing more than Philips players with a slightly improved output stage, or a better quality case.
However, this particular player raised an eyebrow with me because they'd clearly used the cheapest components they could find, and tarted it up to look much higher-end than it was. And, I see no real evidence of engineering going on to be honest -- the power supply hasn't been upgraded (and whistles!!), the transport is really flimsy etc.
At £49 the price would, I guess, be reasonable. The fact is that to a lot of ears, a bog-standard DVD player plays CDs just fine. But hi-fi it isn't.
I've played around with it anyway -- I've verified that the removed digital output is working, and have connected a cheap TDA1305 DAC to it, running on its own power brick wired to the player's mains lead. This DAC was a decent one 15 years or so ago, and the circuit can be put together for around £10.
The player now does a passable impression of my Cyrus CD player, which uses the same DAC. Quite good enough for the third system I bought it for. So not all lost.
And that's the annoying thing. With technology being as it is now, and the profit margins you're looking at here, there was no excuse for them not to do something similar really.
Hmmm, I've just done some reading up on Brighthouse -- I had it in my head that these were just another incarnation of the old Powerhouse chain. Seems I was wrong....
That's the one, although one reviewer does say that the sound quality is good. I beg to differ.