[Miraste]

Let me give an example: soundbars for TVs. Reddit will tell you to never buy one, because a dedicated speaker system sounds better at the same price. This is true-ish. However, a speaker system requires a large, heavy A/V unit, lots of wires, lots of space, and highly noticeable, if not outright ugly, speakers. A soundbar doesn't have any of those problems, is usually the cheaper option, and still sounds much better than built-in speakers. They're the right choice for most people, but it takes reading between the lines to parse that from reddit posts.

[MrLeap]

I trust people to be able to generally decide if they have the space, tolerance for cords and aesthetics to make a purchase decision like that. I'm struggling to visualize the peril in accidentally buying speakers.

Personally, I'll happily pay for something with some features I don't need if it's got good build quality. Finding versions of MANY THINGS that aren't egregiously poorly made seems like it's getting harder?

Maybe this is just the temporal warp of getting older. As subjective time passes by more quickly, entropy is getting more of my attention than when I was younger and a day felt long. It's possible my perception that tools are engineered to the brink of functioning by a thread is survivorship bias. All the old tools that are still trucking are just the ones that survived. No way to know for sure, but if some convincingly thrice burned carpenter on reddit makes me think I oughta buy mikita I probably will.

[Miraste]

The recommendations aren't bad, they're just overkill. Makita makes great tools, but depending on the tool, cheaper ones are fine for most purposes (cheaper, not cheapest, I've seen too many Ryobi contraptions start smoking for that). Guitars and bicycles are two more I've run into where reddit advice will have you paying much more than you need to. Sometimes it's okay to get the no-brand Amazon version, and sometimes it's very much not. It's a skill to determine which is which.

I do think you're right that average quality has gone down. The MBAs of the world work hard to make their products function till the last day of the warranty and not a second longer, and that's a relatively recent business philosophy.

[lupire]

I learned on HN years ago:

Buy a cheap tool. If it breaks, buy one for twice the price. If you lose it before it breaks, buy one for half the price.

[forgetfreeman]

That is some of the worst advice I've ever heard. Cheap tools are always cheap for a reason.

[randomdata]

> Cheap tools are always cheap for a reason.

Right, and that reason is because there is a market for testing tool waters to see if it is a tool that you even need. Often you cannot truly appreciate if a tool is a tool you should have before trying it. You can read testimonials from other people all day, every day, but until it is actually in your hand...

So, hypothetically, do you buy the $100 version with clear compromise, but good enough to offer some validation, or go for the $1,000 ultimate version from the hop? That's the gamble. If your assumption was right, you're in deep for $1,100, but if your assumption proves wrong, you're only out $100. That's the idea here. When in doubt, try the cheap tool, and when you're still wanting to use it beyond its constraints, you've proven you need the more premium product. If you leave it sitting on the shelf, now you know you don't need the tool at all.

As with all short-soundbite suggestions, it's not meant to apply to all situations. But in the average case, it is likely that you are better off gambling the hypothetical $100 – especially when the undertone is within a hobby context. It is very likely you will discover you didn't really like the hobby anyway. Of course, as always, it is assumed you will still bring your thinking cap to the table. Indeed, there are situations where going straight to the hypothetical $1,000 tool is the right choice, but the saying is merely pointing out that it isn't always the best choice like some people are inclined to believe.

[yial]

I agree with you. I do think there are different levels of cheap though.

I don’t have the eloquence to quite describe, but it’s the difference between a harbor freight miter saw, a Milwaukee, a Makita,(their 12 in. Dual-Bevel Sliding Compound Miter Saw, is amazing, but I still use my harbor freight dual bevel as well with a different blade for more construction ish stuff vs trim work / precision ish), and a festool.

My father drives me insane with this. He buys these $1 can openers that break every 3-9 months. He thinks I’m insane for paying $10-$20 for a can opener that has now lasted me 9+ years.

I probably would have been okay with a $5-7 one.

More succinctly : the cheap One is cheap for a reason. But that doesn’t mean you need the most expensive. Usually the cheap tools end up being more in the long run. (Breakage, poor quality output, time, material usage….)

When I first got a 10 inch table saw, I couldn’t believe how easy things were: setting the fence, cutting hard wood, depth adjustments were so much faster. But I still have my 8 inch craftsman I paid $5 for at a yard sale 20 years ago, and it’s not bad.

[forgetfreeman]

I'm not advocating for running out and filling your shop with boutique tools by any stretch. Mid-market brands like Dewalt are perfectly serviceable without incurring all of the safety issues that harbor freight brands are notorious for.

[yial]

Yes. Sorry. I didn’t think you were!

Harbor Freight is interesting to me, many of their items I won’t buy due to the quality, but certain other things tend to be excellent. However, I have noticed a trend where HF has started to have a few genuine quality offerings - but the price differential from a name brand shrinks drastically.

Example: their Hercules dual bevel miter saw- $349.99

A mostly comparable dewalt is $399.99.

(The dewalt is better in my opinion even because of how the detent overide and adjustment works, not to mention more positive stops )

An example of a gem however is their $50 electric planer. I own an older version of it. I don’t think it’s particularly great as your only / primary electric hand planer(except in a pinch), but the ability to use it roughly / places / ways that would damage a better planer. (Example, planing an old door while still mounted, or leveling a floor with luan ply, and planing areas that have adhesive, small nails, debris…)

[mlyle]

Cheap tools are usually adequate to judge whether this is a type of tool you need and will frequently use... and cheap tools may be adequate to meet your entire need.

I frequently buy cheap tools while I am learning about whether I need a "real" one and which one I should then select. I would suggest other people do so, too.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

Yeah. The trick is to never buy a cheap replacement tool.

[KronisLV]

I actually got a cheap Chinese chainsaw for some light work around the countryside, it cost me about 80 EUR and performs adequately for the task at hand.

So then I bought another one of the same variety, with the expectation that once this (or the other one) dies, it can be cannibalized for spare parts if need be AND I won’t have to stop in the middle of doing something, cause of the backup.

It’s much the same for me when buying mechanical keyboards, computer mice, HDDs/SSDs or other technology too. My current CPU is on AM4 because I have the old one as a backup and a spare motherboard too.

What can I say, I like having backups and being reasonably frugal: e.g. getting a mid range phone since I don’t need fancy features and if anything happens to it it won’t be a big financial hit to replace (or use any old one for a bit, until the new one arrives, since none receive software updates for that many years).

[hansvm]

Part of the problem is that expensive tools are not usually expensive for a reason. Till you work with the cheaper one a bit you don't even know what you want from the expensive tool and can easily buy a "cheap" tool at a high dollar cost.

Another side of that idea is that you often don't need the more expensive features. My immersion blender is the cheapest thing I could get my grubby little mitts on. It reaches to the bottom of the deepest pot I care to use it with, it's plenty powerful to chop up veggies smoothly, and it doesn't overheat on sustained use. It would not work in a professional kitchen, but I don't run a professional kitchen. Any additional expenditure would have been wasted, and if the item were bigger, were heavier, or had more attachments, those would just represent a waste of space in my house.

[yunwal]

The other thing is that I have the "slightly upmarket" immersion blender (Breville) that everyone recommends and mine overheats before finishing a pot of soup. Which made me realize that most people who recommend things (on reddit or anywhere) don't use them enough to have firsthand experience with that thing, they're just repeating what they've heard.

[lelanthran]

> That is some of the worst advice I've ever heard. Cheap tools are always cheap for a reason.

As a DIY person with a garage filled with every type of tool imaginable, that is some of the best advice that can be given: buy cheap tools, but expensiver tools if it breaks.

IME, most people don't use the cheap tool enough to break it.

[forgetfreeman]

As a contractor who makes a living off his tools daily your read-through is one of the reasons why I know so many people with permanent eye injuries from buying shitty hammers. Cheap tools are dangerous.

[josephg]

Yep. And cheap tools are bad in more ways than life expectancy.

Cheap knives can’t hold an edge. Cheap laptops are slow, have bad battery life and crash. Cheap microphones make your speech more tiring to listen to. And so on.

[bsder]

> A soundbar doesn't have any of those problems, is usually the cheaper option, and still sounds much better than built-in speakers.

The specific problem here seems to be that soundbars have gone actively backward over time.

I had an old JBL soundbar whose only issue was that it had no Bluetooth security. This meant that someone in the apartment complex would randomly connect to it and blast us with 900 decibels of whatever they were watching--generally at 7:30AM.

So, we went searching for a replacement. We must have listened to every soundbar available at retail.

They were all expensive and all sucked--none of them were better than that 10 year old JBL.

Eventually we opted for a sound system that was not particularly cheap. And my wife still complains that it doesn't sound any better than the old soundbar we replaced. And she is correct.

[nyanpasu64]

Could you disable Bluetooth and buy an external Bluetooth receiver that outputs analog audio?

[bsder]

Alas, no. You couldn't disable Bluetooth completely. As soon as it "woke up" from any "sleep", Bluetooth would always reenable itself even though I always had the optic fibre cable plugged in.

Probably the only thing I could have done was cover it in aluminum foil. I thought about just opening it up and tearing out the antenna, but the casing was an injection molded piece with integrated clips. It would break on opening and not be possible to put back together.

[Zak]

A friend recently asked for budget speaker recommendations and was leaning toward a soundbar. I helped research; I'm a big fan of checking enthusiast communities for product guides, perhaps in part because I maintain one for flashlights. I came across the same advice to avoid soundbars and ended up with a list of powered speakers instead. That's no more complicated to hook up than a soundbar, and my friend was extremely satisfied with the speakers.

I think they probably wouldn't have been as satisfied with a similarly priced soundbar. It's not because the soundbar couldn't be as good, but in practice usually wouldn't be. The intended audience isn't as discerning, so products don't have to be as good to sell well.

The trick with enthusiast recommendations is to limit scope creep if you're not trying to become a hobbyist yourself. Don't get talked into a complex audio system or a flashlight with fan cooling and 80000 lumens when your needs are basic, but do get the $80 powered speakers and the 18650-powered flashlight with USB charging.

[recursive]

> requires a large, heavy A/V unit

Not really. You can use powered bookshelf speakers or studio monitors just fine. That's what I do.

[wiredfool]

Small amps have gotten remarkably good in the last few years.

[lupire]

Top google result for [tv soundbar reddit] https://www.reddit.com/r/Soundbars/comments/137ukxi/are_soun...

is this exact debate.

[Miraste]

That's in r/Soundbars, which is naturally rather favorable. The outright dismissals I've run into come from the much larger r/hometheater, which is also the source of most TV audio buying guides.

[pokerface_86]

it absolutely doesn’t, the common reddit recommendation is to just get edifier r1280dbs and a sub, and you’ll outperform most soundbar systems that cost even 2x as much.