Most overrated audio manufacturers?

The manufacturing cost of a component is relatively small (including R+D) compared to what we ultimately pay for it. Included in the cost are things also such as anticipated warantee and customer service costs. Although the performance of a product is quite subjective, but poor service is reasonably easily measured. (If you search for the thread I started you will see who I am thinking of.) So I would like to add this aspect to the discusion. Any company that suposedly produces high end equipment but provides poor service would in my opinion be overated. On the flip side of the coin I have a pair of speakers whose components probably cost no more than 25% of the selling price. But the service I get from the seller is beyond the call of duty. So what is the true value of the speakers?

A point regarding Sevan's comment: "Some equipment clearly justifies it cost from an engineering standpoint, exotic materials, superb manufacturing, etc"

I'm not at all sure that "exotic" materials aren't chosen especially to hoodwink us into thinking it is somehow better than what went before and therefore worth paying much more for. If diamond tweeters were so great, why do hi end speaker manufacturers still use silk dome tweeters, compresion horns and so on? Marten speakers are lovely to behold but whenever I have heard them sounded so clean and analytical as to be boring. Here I should probably admit to being a fan of 300b SET and high efficiency speakers. Not exclusively. I don;t care how audio nirvana is produced,its just that this is what currently suits me best. The use of OHNO cast silver wire in products is another case in point. Audio improvement, or hype?

Also I don't think we should necessarily pay attention to what Audiophile or any other mag is touting as being the bee's knees. You really have to hear it yourself at home. What is not often discussed is the quality of the listening room. In this thread there a are several comments about how poor various components sound. IS it the component or the room that creates the poor impression? I can put my speakers in different positions in the room and each place sounds different. So how exactly do they sound?
And indeed you can sometimes see this in reviews. Two different reviewers say different things about a component. Actually this is what I would expect. It is when everyone say the same things that alarm bells begin to ring. (e.g. with which manufacturer do you associate the terminoligy "PRaT" more than any other?)
Subjectively it is difficult to determin what component is overated. I listend to a high value DAC in my system. sounded terrible. I listend to it at my brothers, sounded brilliant. We cant listen to everything thats available and we tend to go with those components the press say are the best. They pull our strings to a degree.
Every manufacturer is out to make as much money as possible. They decide how much the local market can take. I live in Switzerland. Being taken for a ride is a way of life here.

Hi Chriswil, you make some excellent points. How we do we truthfully determine, each for ourselves, which makers are overrated?...when the truth of the matter is that because of what you say (rightfully) about manufacturing, material and development costs making up such a small portion of the final cost to customer, that the answer to that question, all things considered, might well be "just about any of them" - and as you consider that to be the lay of the land to begin with, then "just about none of them" might serve just as well...it all tends to end up pretty relative, since for any one maker you could think of as being overrated, by the same yardstick, you could probably name another and yet another, ad infinitum...until the original distinction becomes lost.

Any company that supposedly produces high end equipment but provides poor service would in my opinion be overated.

+1
The whole "overrated" thing is in the ear of the beholder, as indicated in the "high value DAC" example by Chriswil. However, his "poor service" definition of overrated makes the most sense of anything I have so far read in this thread.

Judyazblues,

I don't know about Atma-Sphere amps only being suitable for 5% of speakers. The odds were not on my side when I bought my Raidho C1.1 speakers. But my Atma-Sphere S-30 drives my Raidho speakers to perfection -- with the Paul Speltz auto-transformers added. I have at least 50 db. headroom on most recordings with my PS Audio DirectStream DAC that has a gain of at least 10 db. If you add the Paul Speltz auto-transformers to your system the Atma-Sphere amp should have enough power to drive most mid to low sensitivity speakers, IMHO. There are 3 settings on the auto-transformer and I use the lowest setting.

But I do agree with you about Synergistic Research cables. IMO, they should limit themselves to the tweak business, which looks like the direction they are heading.

I would add a number of other cables makers to Synergistic Research in the the BIG CABLE YAWN category: ASI Liveline, Cardas, Gabriel Gold, Grover Huffman, HiDiamond, Kimber, Mogami and Pangea -- among others.