The Most Overrated Studio Gear (and the Most Underrated) 

Honestly, as I get older, I'm now viewing a decent chair (that doesn't increase my occasional lower back pain) or maybe even a standing desk as an under-rated necessity!

I've got a Neve summing mixer that never gets used - just a bunch of pretty lights for the studio. In blind tests, clients would more often choose the ITB mix over the Neve.

I agree with you 100%... but man... you could've said that in 5 minutes instead of 20.

One of the best, if not THE best upgrades I did to my studio, is acoustic treatment. Without changing or adding a single piece of audio gear, I basically transformed my studio and started to realize that it wasn't my onboard preamps that needed upgrading, it wasn't the converters and it wasn't even my decent but modest studio monitors that needed upgrading. In a very real way, all of this equipment was "upgraded" when I radically upgraded the acoustic treatment of my studio. Hearing the things I recorded and later mixing them in the improved acoustics space made me realize that the equipment was not the issue but rather the acoustics of the environment I was working in. I 100% agree! Acoustic treatment is indeed the most underrated studio gear.

Underrated: experience, intelligence, work ethic, honesty.

I respectfully disagree in regards to pre-amps being overrated. I think that’s the important part of the chain IMO. Due to the fact it is the first thing in the chain. Same logic goes with a guitarists amplifier. You can have all the best guitar pedals and effects, just as you can have the best mic’s, eq’s, compressors etc, but if the pre-amp is lacking or isn’t appropriate for the source being recorded, then from my experience, you’ll most likely have to over saturate your signal through those said effects to get any vibe or color for your recorded source. This is just my opinion of course! Love this video and topic. Cheers

Yes! So regarding "Maybe YOU can't hear the difference!" I'll tell you who absolutely cannot hear the difference and doesn't care. The person at the bus stop listening on their iPhone earbuds. I've never once heard an end-user say - Oh I love that track but would it have killed them to have used a Neve preamp on the lead vocal?! Nobody cares. I totally agree with your point regarding acoustic treatment. For those of us mixing ITB on a desktop and powered monitors, I'd say an uninterruptible power supply is an absolute must. Where I live the power has been rock solid for more than 20 years but this year there's been a number of freak storms that have caused power cuts. Twice while I've been mixing. My next studio gear acquisition will be made by APC!

This is spot on. I work with a lot of new-ish artists and I can't tell you how many times I listen to recordings from poorly treated rooms. I always say acoustic treatment is the first thing to do before you start recording.

Good point on preamps. The number of pop records being cut on little UAD interfaces is really a testament to this. I have been super impressed by my SPL crimson. It makes my DI guitar sound as good as ANYTHING I have used before. Mics make a MASSIVE difference. Performance makes a difference. The production choices you make also make a huge difference.

Best bang for the buck when it comes to improvement in sound when mastering: Red wine.

Great vid. I"m one of those nerds. I used to be a hardware snob. Back in the early 2000's to 2010, I used apogee converters, and Avalon, U/A 610b, Chandler, Neve, API pre amps, plugins have become so great, that I have sold most of my hardware. I've also spent countless hours, trying different mic techniques and diff mics on various converters to find which combos work best.

I've been teaching myself to produce/mix for the past 18 months and monitor positioning was probably the last thing I did and overlooked. As you say there's so many easy wins. I have a pair of mid priced monitors which i love but I think knowing them and positioning is far more important than their quality. In addition to the aforementioned a good monitor controller, headphone amp is great. Even a reasonable mixer, that allows you set to up and record with zero latency, I find latency when recording a massive handicap- especially when recording vocals.

Heh, MicPres" The king has no clothes! I say it and people want to kill me. A $5,500 DW Fearn VT-2 will make a Shure SM57 sound as good as it can, but it is still a $100 SM57. I have. VT-2 because it makes my $5,000 vintage RCA ribbon mics sound great! That is the differentiator. But if you have a $4,000 budget, spend the bulk on the mic, not converters. But as far as A/D converters go, right on! It is the analog filters at the head of the A/D process that makes the difference. Wrong slope and phase filtering at 20K and you get artifacts from aliasing distortion. Not from sampling and 24 bit quantization process. Thank you! And full disclosure, I was an intern at Doug Fearn's Philadelphia studio for a short period in 1980 long before he manufactured gear. He was brilliant.then and he is brilliant now. He taught me more than he knows. In closing "get the blue cables, they sound sooooo much better than the black ones." Yeah, right.

Prio: 1) Acoustic treatment 2) speakers 3) mic 4) a good hardware compressor … 100) mic preamp 101) focusrite 6i8 … 1001) fancy midi-gear

While I disagree with your opinion on mic press and converters as being overrated, I do really appreciate that you touched on room treatment. All the best gear you can posses could be handicapped if you cannot control the acoustics of your listening environment with some measure of accuracy. Another eye opener for me was cables. Best not to cut corners when it comes to cables to save money. I unfortunately learned that lesson the hard way too many times. Especially when comes to your monitors. Thank you for the video!

1. Social proof with expensive gear 2. Pro Tools 3. Preamp indeed 4. Quality over social Skills 5. Phase shift of Multiband 6. Aquire gear over having clean electricity and conversion

1. Daw 2. Converters 3. Preamps 4. EQ plug-in 5. High End Cables Now I’ll have a listen and see what you reckon Justin!

I’m gonna comment on this before I see your picks… my picks are: Overrated: - NS10s - Avalon 737 - Neumann TLM102 - Every Genelec monitor with plastic cabinet. Underrated: - Joemeek stuff - JZ Microphones (any mic) - Elysia stuff (even the cheaper modules) - Josephson measuring mics - Cloudlifters

The listening test thing is so true, the differences are so subtle.

Most underrated : Chair Mouse Keyboard Screens Controllers (acoustic space for sure) Support for headphones Stock plugins

100% agree. Acoustic treatment is worth so so much more than anything else. It can cost 3-5k to do it right in a medium-small studio. But i waited way way too long to just bite the bullet and put gik bass traps and ceiling clouds everywhere

patchbay defiantly underrated

In my experience its all the subtle things combined that make the difference. When tracking and Mixing its the thing that's getting me closer to a more professional sounding end product. It all depends where your at in building your recording space. As you said they are subtle so start with what makes the biggest improvements in your sound first then refine your sound capture/processing with these more subtle things when the major things are sorted. Just my opinion.

The proper A/B test for preamps is not one versus another, but Preamp vs. No Preamp (straight digital). A good preamp will always sound better - especially if they can be driven/saturated, etc.

Preamps definitely have their own character. There are some decent inexpensive mic pre’s these days, but I have had to work on so many projects recorded on crappy preamp’s, and it’s really hard to make them sound like anything other than crap.

Underrated: Monitors. I get crazy seeing all that setups with full racks of good outboard that costs thousands and then they're mixing on Krks or Yamahas hs's. Definetly acoustics in that group too.

I totally agree with your picks of over- and underrated gear, but there is one point missing for me: I think blind-tests do not always tell the whole truth about a difference in sound quality if you only listen on a single sound source. From my experience even differences in the range of nuances can add up to a significant difference when applied to multiple channels in a mix - for better or worse. Of course that's not only true for Preamps, but even more for room-treatment, not to mention for the source of the signal (like a Drumset that is set up perfectly or is not), but I think you have to keep that in mind to appreciate what Preamps do to the sound (at least if you compare cheap and half-decent preamps and not decent preamps and boutique preamps - I'm not so sure about that).

Most underrated: On-line UPS (uninterruptible power supply). Keeps gear healthy, protects gears and eliminates noise. Best purchase I ever made.

Planning a good room isolation, treatment, blah blah blah is the first thing. If you don’t feel comfortable and you get distracted with this issues doesn’t matter the gear you have you will never reach your goal. I agree that low price interfaces sound great comparing them to older devices. Anyway there is a big difference with more expensive models. Also, for me it’s not about the price it’s more how you feel and like the sound thru them and that’s the same for pre-amps. Having in your room a 1073 is great but maybe doesn’t fit in your sound and that’s why I think it’s more important to make a balance between quality, personal taste, workflow and price. As in other comments I agree that pre amps, compressors or eq shine is during the recording stage were you use them in context with the interpretation from the musician, singer or whatever and so in the mixing stage when you overthinking what to do with a sound.

The only preamp I've heard that would make me justify a huge expenditure was when I heard the Coil tube preamps... They have an EQ on them too, the most almighty tone.

An efficient and and effective workflow is highly underrated.

i would say guitar/bass pedals are underrated pieces of gear. they can be really useful for adding colours to mixing. especially nowadays many manufacturers already increases the specs to handle hotter signals. and plus, we all live to have impedance mismatch for distortion anyways, aren’t we? hehe

Phillips hue is a must !!! And they just dropped an update to where the light shift and change autonomously it’s the best ambience ever !! Highly recommend !

I'm a big fan of hybrid work. I mainly include analog outboard pricing because I love the tactile element. FOR ME, getting my hands on those knobs helps with my workflow. Reason #2 is to take a little load off the CPU - ITB saturation processors are finally there. You can make a record in the box today and nobody can tell the difference - if two criteria are met: 1) the engineer and the plugins/DAW are high enough quality, and 2) you have the CPU. Now, I'm happy with the gear I have. Still, if I really wanted to truly match my analog sound, I'd need more power. Maybe that's my skill level too (almost certainly is 😉) but you can push analog gear hard, saturate the hell out of it over the entire range - and no aliasing! Because that's how it works! All that said, I do not spend a lot on outboard gear. I have the Black Lion parametric eq they put out years back that nobody actually bought 🤣 and the ART Pro-VLA optical compressor. Would matched pairs of Pultecs and LA-2As be better? Yeah! For sure! But I'm comfortable with these pieces. They're fine for what I'm doing; and the upgrade, while it would be nice to have, wouldn't be worth the price. Hell, if I could redo my rack from scratch I'd just fill it with the Drawmer tube preamp/comp, EQ, multiband FET comp, and saturator/stereo processor. Those 4 pieces are like $5K new. Total. And I'd be happy, they're outstanding, pro-level (far more pro-level than the engineer, in my case) kit; at very reasonable prices. Mics... man, you can go a long way for a lot less $$ than you used to be able to. I don't care for the peaky Chinese 67 capsule, but it did do one huge thing: it put downward price pressure on the industry overall. You can stock a mic locker with world-class pieces from JZ, Austrian Audio, and Lewitt for... well, a well-stocked locker is still expensive in absolute terms - but relatively? And that's just for companies that are still innovating: Telefunken USA, Lauten Audio - and yeah, Roswell/MicParts - are making traditional (read: German 😂) style mics for a fraction of the price. **edit - wanted to show some love to Fathead and Royer 10 ribbons, too. And one of my favorite mics to fill a gap in the spectrum is this $80 MXL dynamic with a smaller and a larger cartridge you can blend together for whatever frequency range you might need - I doubt I'll ever sing into it, or mic a solo acoustic or anything like that; but it's exactly what I reach for when someone else might reach for a 57. Plugins? Klanghelm makes killer compressors and a saturator... FOR FREE. And their full-featured versions are like $30. Kazrog's True Iron transformer saturator is 30 or 40. Analog Obsession makes free stuff, not to mention Valhalla - you can fill your *virtual* rack for free or cheap, too. All that brings me to: the right room? It's harder to skimp on that. Acoustic treatments? One panel isn't expensive, but it adds up - how much you need depends on the room. You don't need to spend a *lot* on monitoring, but there's definitely a floor: I do most mixing on headphones and use NF monitors (intentionally crappy ones 😉) to check my mix - Beyer 770s and MixCubes. I don't know that you can do it much cheaper than that (and if I had $2K to upgrade, it'd probably go to decent monitors that can fill in the gap, give full-range monitoring in speaker form... BUT monitoring on speakers would necessitate improving my room...) And of course the other thing you can't cheap out on is time. It takes time to learn an instrument, to write songs, to learn the crafts of recording, mixing, mastering... and that's time you could have spent doing literally anything else, unless you're one of us who just HAS to make music.

Agree completely with pres and convertors, I have a couple of expensive racks here. Like you there is some difference and I have my preferences but it is subtle. If I was starting over I'd put more emphasis on the room, the speakers, headphones and room treatments for sure. Agree completely on the room comfort and the dimmers tip is great. One other important factor for a good space is organized storage space. It isn't sexy but man it makes a difference when you have a place for your tripods, cables etc. Keep it coming.

Most underrated....studio treatment. I See so many home set ups with terable rooms. Getting your room reflections taking care of as best you can should be your first priority

While I would rather weight and argue more on usability in some cases than on quality I 100% agree with additional external mic pre amps. Even if we have several diamonds of them here on SAN I always argue regarding the pre recording coloring. It limits your mix flexibility. Lot of it you can do afterwards. But I do not agree with convertes because: Far more important than a pre amp is the mic input quality of your recording device, no matter if it is an analogue one or an audio interface (and there you also should care about the quality of AD/DA, yes). There you can trash your recordings finally before they even get recorded. So put more money in the mic input quality than into external mic preamps if you have to choose. And to blind test AD/DA you should create "summed up" examples. Comparing single shots wouldn't be fair to proove that there are differences. What I mean by that is you will hear differences when you go in and out and in and out again. And you will hear differences when you record an orchestra of 100 people > 100 mics/channels and you sum them up. There you will definitely hear the difference between a good and a bad AD/DA or mic input.

I love Burl sound too

My list of overrated: Summing mixer versus no summing mixer, expensive guitars vs moderate guitars, tube amps versus Kemper, a zillion mic types versus 3 or 4......type of speakers versus learning the decent speakers and room you have. Underrated - music promotion!....ie what to do once you record Sgt Pepper and you cant find ears to hear your music...ha....Thanks for the fun discussion! (ps...thanks for encouraging me to treat room...I have a low C build up that is rattling my brain....I know it is there and I account for it....but that would be a good use of money to make that go away)

A good option for this conversation could be the lack of transformer technology in modern music compared to analog gear with transformers. Some SSL popular equipment does not use transformers, neither does the more recently sold Neumann preamp. Computer plugins obviously cannot imbue the flavor of transformers into a mix being a digital emulation of analog gear. A lot of people prefer the modern taste of no transformer over transformer in. Like SSL preferred over Neve style music sound as you may already know. Transformer yes or transformer no, that is the question.

this guy is my favorite narcisst lol.

I have several external mic preamps, of different types; tube, solid state (both with XFO’s and without) and while I agree that there are sonic differences between them, I wouldn’t consider any of those differences to be “crucial” in terms of making (or breaking) the overall sound of a record. What I find more important with mic preamps, is in their functionality…things like beefy amounts of available gain, or impedance selection/adjustment, both of which can make a very noticeable difference when using ribbon and lower output dynamic mics… Other features, such as having inserts for external processing, multiple outputs for aux/cue sends, XLR, 1/4” instrument DI and balanced Line inputs, are all more important to me than the subtle, esoteric sonic differences between different preamp models. IMO.

The one thing that I wonder about with all the preamp/converter double blind talk is about the cumulative effect. From what I’ve seen it’s not about a single track sounding different, it’s about the entire project all having that super subtle touch each track which therefore amounts to something not so subtle at all by the end. Some of those sounds we love are from signals being processed by line amps and what these days is unnecessary analog physical travel of audio around a studio, imparting ‘that’ sound. That being said, I’ve waisted too much time listening and reading about preamps. It’s a good point to bring, especially for artists and producers.

I remember seeing that preamp shootout on some recording forum back in 2005 or so. All the preamps sounded identical to me except for the Great River unit. That one stood out (to me).

Underated: Direct boxes. Comfortable Chair. Trackball mouse. Sand clock.

The Hardware OVERPRICED studio Boogie man is gonna GET YOU😂🤣😂🤣💯💪

About pre amps. Everywhere on the internet said you need an analog pre amp for your mic. Then i got slate ...

AD/DA converters we’re much more of a big deal about 20-25 years ago when the market was still emerging.

I was thinking preamps #1 before you said it..

Headphone cables! Good headphone/. Cue system with good cables is overlooked too often. Great video as always

Wow you can really go on and on! Cheers.

Makes s lot of sense but for me l would include the monitors (as best as you can afford.)They go hand in hand with the ac. treatment.

Launchpad is overrated, especially the mini. Too many pads and all jumbled together. They're too small and hard to keep track of which is which laid out 8x8. And the ability to "control Live" with it: useless. I sold mine & got a Korg nanoPAD2: 2 rows of 8 pads, bigger, more spaced out, and they don't push in, they're stiff but soft, much better response. You don't hit several pads at once and you can remember which is which. Plus the lil X-Y finger pad is great. Expensive USB interfaces are overrated: all the $500+ ones with 8 mic inputs dont have a Mix knob! (Blend between the interface inputs and the DAW outputs.) The Behringer UMC1820 for $279 has this, why doesn't the $549 Focusrite or the $529 Presonus? I think Ableton Live 11 Suite is overrated and overpriced. Got mine for $600 (upgrade price + coupon). There are so many things it doesn't do that Reaper can. I mean, just compare the preferences menus: the Live prefs are few, Reaper has pages upon pages of details to fine tune. And zooming in Live is so irritating, having to drag up/down to zoom, which also goes left/right because no mouse is that precise, so trying to zoom into a specific point is so ridiculously hard. You need a XXL mouse pad, too. The only reason I got Live was so many good drums. The graphics are about 20 years old looking, too. Underrated (and overpriced): having fresh stainless steel bass strings. Large, triangle picks made of metal! Wound G strings for guitar are infinitely better and completely solve the G string intonation and ugly ringing noise issues. E-Bow! You can do so much with an E-Bow. Turns a guitar into a completely different instrument, for a relatively low price. Overrated: Boss ME-80 multi-FX: great layout/interface and FX, but sounds very thin & digital. Balanced 1/4" cables: nothing gets rid of that nasty digital computer noise (the sound of the hard drive & processors running that gets into the speakers, gross. Just have to keep reminding yourself that it's not really there and won't be in the rendered track.)

This is a great video - love it. All totally true and yet I'm not going to even look at the disagreement in the comments. Keep up the good work :-) 🙂

If I may ask, Justin, 1. what type of music have you done most and, 2. What's your preferred genre?

Hope the AC gets fixed soon brotha xD !! But really keep up the episodes!

You’re crazy on the micpre!!

Most underrated: trying out different mics.. even cheap ones. Price does NOT mean better in every situation :-).. and many techs just put the mics on the session that they always use.. NEVER stop trying different mics. Example: SM57 is great on snare drums.. sure.. are there other choices that with some drummers, and some snare drums will do a better job?.. YES

I will certainly not flag you about the mike preamp, but i have to tell that the way I use them, they DO have their reason to exist. I drive them pretty hot, and then i attenuate the output to an amount where my AD/DA interface will not clip, but still get the girth of the analog compression and subtle distrortion that comes across with a good mike pre.

Don’t light dimmers (and neon) cause EMI and overall noise in electric guitars? Maybe that’s not a great advice for guitar people, I agree with all the rest tho

Hi @SonicScoop, will a Kayotica Eyeball improve the “room” of the microphone?

id really like to see an experiment where we play a regular person a song recorded on all behringer gear, and then the same song recorded at abbey road but it's 5db quieter and see what people prefer. probs the same outcome if you subtract a few db off a high shelf of the abbey road one too. the human ear is so easily hackable

2:02 the first item

Coming from Behringer eurodesk preamps to Presonus xamps in their digital mixers was an eye opener or should I say ear opener big difference! As my studio grew and I got better gear did I fuck up and waste my cash?!?? I got a Chameleon Labs 7603 Xmod the latest acquisition does it make a difference? Does made in the USA parts and construction and UK Charnhill input/output transformers make a difference did I waste my $$? Well yes to my ears yes it makes a difference coming from what I was using It does to me I blind tested lots of gear and don't just buy shit to look cool in my racks lots of reasearch goes into those purchases that may be nothing to the financially set but not to the average joe that has to put food on the table.

Hey Justin, great video and while I agree with you on your list unfortunately the real world sees things differently. As I see it in order to survive in the world of pro studios most of us are not working with top name talent. We are working with the wana bees. Or the artist that is releasing on sound cloud etc. Most of these musicians have no real idea about what it takes to record a top quality track. When they hire a studio they look at 2 things, the hourly price and the equipment list. And that equipment list needs to be long. If they come to visit the studio before they book, they want to see a wall of blinking lights. Rack after rack of outboard equipment. Granted, we can do most everything in the box now days but these people don't know that. That wall of equipment will keep you busy. 2 studios side by side, same rates. One using just a DAW and plugins. Studio 2 has all of the equipment as studio 1 plus a wall full of outboard gear. Studio 2 will get the gig most every time. This is true even if studio 1 produces a better product. You may not realize it but when you traveled around with that rack of gear. You impressed a ton of people. Having said all of that, your list of under rated items was spot on.

The “3D” sound you-get from Neve , API… You will never get from any interface, plus if you own a commercial business , that’s what people pay for. Equipment they can’t own.

Computer Ram and processing power with your computer

Hey Justin. Just found you. Just subscribed. Looking forward to more videos like this one 👍

Just stopped me from getting another preamp!!! Morning hawk

Very good video and totally on the point. Preamps are amplifiers and they supposed to make signals louder. That is their main job - surprise. If anybody shows another anybody a new song on streaming service it wouldn't be possible to tell which preamps where used.

Sir... What is this "de-noiser" of which you speak?

Spot on with the pre amps..

Well, as far as mic pre’s go, just ask Elliott Randal how his solo would have come out were it not for the NEVE. I can tell you first hand if I were to overdrive my Trident 80B like they did on his solo it would have been unusable the Trident compared to a Neve is a big difference when it comes to their mic pre’s. The Trident is ok but nowhere on the level of a Neve or SSL.

Those Lynn Fuston comparison CDs were great.

Ppl who have done ear training are going to going to be more likely to be able to tell the difference with mic pre's than a person who is just starting out so why would someone need them when first stating out?

so many people are just fooled by name brand snobery. Great for the company, bad for the customer.

My two cents. 1. It's hard to talk about mic pres in a general way. It's about the chain. The source that's in front of you and the mics and pres available. You may not have a selection of pres thst have different enough character to decern. The charecter and fequency profile of your source may translate well on many things... or not. You might want to use a ribbon mic in witch case preamp choice is a much bigger deal. So..The subtle difference in pres can become far less subtle on a particular sorce... but, however subtle, you certainly want what sounds better and it's certainly not a small thing bc....point number 2... Subtle difference plus subtle difference plus subtle difference ect. equals big difference. Like folks who design high output engines. It's 1 percent here plus 2 percent there and so on that gets you a 12 percent acceleration boost. In a bubble, a subtle differnce on 1 sorce doesn't make or brake the song, but how about a subtle difference on every sorce? 50 plus sorces?We get to a point where we're ringing out subtle differences at every point in the process to gain a big decernible difference when the records done. To conclude... none of these things are over rated. What individuals need to decide is.. at what price point do the benifits of each of things make sense. And that depends on your work flow and your goals and whatever else.

Suttle differences make all the difference in any sport and the competition atmosphere in this business runs a close race so get any edge you can. So get the pre amp if you can.

I used a cheap focus rite recently and the expense was horrible a great needs a great mic pre and great converters..the cheap sounds cheap..something I cannot get out of it ....I tried them all ...I go burl with neve summing all day external gear with plugins ...great room with focal trio 11

can I actually just base on computer with good audiointerface and make it 100% right?

Also overrated piece of equipment: Kaotica Eyeball. I’m better off with my blankets shoved into the ceiling in my basement 😂

”Sponsored by Focusrite Shitlett”

My greatest instrument - the mouse.

if you dont drive the preamp enough it wont sound much different. that's the key. sometimes you want transparency though. with 8-16 tracks on a vintage Neve it's more colored than on an SSL. in solo the individual tracks might sound pretty close.

I think I get the gist of your point. If you have a budget, put it where you get the most bang for our buck. I can't disagree with that logic

ONLY the preamp matters

Solid points…

The most important piece of gear in my room ? My ears. Start at the BEGINNING. Learn how to record with one mic., one MONO tape recorder, one basement. Train your EARS. You will NOT need 99% of this studio 'gear'. Learn how to record music, not FIX music. Imagine that.

I disagree on preamps. They make a big difference when everything else is decent. Of course they aren’t the most important part of the chain.

Hi Scoop, Overrated gear ? That huge SSL 9000 in the main room ! If that's what you think you need to make a good recording, you might want to reassess your capabilities. The big studios have this gear to attract big name talent. As you point out, far better records were made with far less gear. Underrated gear ? A properly tuned (NOT 'dead') room and excellent LARGE monitors. You can't reproduce 30 Hz. with 8" monitors.

When it comes to analog to digital conversion there's definitely a whole realm of different possibilities and you can definitely hear the difference but when it comes to digital to analog conversion, it is a fact that pretty much every home stereo and every laptop and every cell phone and every MP3 player and so on and so forth down the line of things that create sound that have a digital memory Bank in them all have the exact same Samsung chip in them or the same Taisco chip in them, and the funny part about that is that 90% of all of those products have those two chips and those two chips really aren't even different from each other.

I'd say most overrated would be outboard gear (compressors, Eqs, limiters, etc.) Most underrated would probably be Monitors, computer and chair.

I don't agree about preamps. Just try to record through your built-in preamp and outboard preamp, obviously you will hear not a subtle difference

Googled "whataboutism" and landed here.

Funny that the only gear apart from the essentials that I have in my studio is a mic preamp. I have the dbx 286s and I got it to solve a specific problem. It helps me filter low level noise, helps with tonal flavour of the mic so I don't have to always switch mics for different vocals. Also use the deesser. I find that it helps me get better recordings on vocals particularly and reduces the time I spend trying to fix harsh or noisy recordings.

The best preamp should do nothing to the sound. Any preamp that modifies the sound is adding distortion.

I had warm audio 312 api knock off and isa428. Then i got all neve 1073 and my recording took a big step forward. Its not about 1 pre amp. Its how they stack after 24 tracks.

I think many of this comes from past times where there was actual bad gear on the market. Nowadays even budget gear is not really bad. Of course there is a difference to high end gear but it’s not as high as it used to be.

mic position is more important than the preamp too

As a 80s lover guitarist,i love rack gear,best gear is dytronics tri stereo chorus+digitech gsp 2101 overated is anything by ART i had a sgx express pre amp i thought it was utter crap