Are there any actually good gear review channels that give critical analysis of equipment? The good, the bad, the ugly, and the idiosyncratic. Realistically most modern gear is solid, and the question is not if it’s quality or not, but what sorts of uses or user it is best suited for.
The system for gear review is broken. There are lots of gear review sources out there, but they are all either vendors or content creators trying to make money off of affiliate links. Either way, the incentive is to make every product look as good as possible.
The only one that really comes to mind is Low End Lobster, but her reviews seem focused pretty exclusively on guitars, not other gear like amps, cabs, pedals, etc.
It’s pretty hard to beat Julian Krause for audio interface and other audio equipment reviews. I didn’t want to spend the money on a second RME Fireface UCX II for my new Mickeysoft Surface Pro 11 Elite X Snapdragon ARM tablet. I did some Googleing for native ARM ASIO drivers and found out that the 4th gen Focusrite Scarletts have them. I watched a bunch of YT videos on the 4th gen 4i4 and Julian’s was easily the best. Bitwig’s 5.3 beta (now #4) is also available in a native ARM version, so I ordered a 4i4 from Amazon.fr. Arriving Friday.
A few here and there, but you have to invest some time learning their bias. All reviews are biased but once you learn the reviewer style and taste, you can quickly determine how it would work for you.
The one that cover the most gears is bass the world Gregor is very consistent with his narrative and he’s a gear head. Guitar geek is very thorough and he also explains how he route the source.
There’s no one place to look up everything, that would suck the fun out of GASsing,
AMP has a good channel, but doesn’t make a lot of videos. Johnathon Wong covers short scale pretty well.
Small guys are the most honest. they don’t have as much skin in the game and can say what they think. If people send you free equipment to review, like Gregor, one wonders how it affects bias.
It’s not the free equipment that I think drives bias. It’s the affiliate links. They’re paid a commission when someone buys the product based off their review.
I like Gregor’s videos, but he still ends most reviews with, “Click the affiliate link below.”
In my experience of the last 4 years watching YouTube bass channels, no. Treat everything as an advert.
If you’re interested in a product, just watch multiple reviews and see if there’s a consensus.
If you watch enough content you can also read between the lines i.e. Gregor has different levels of what appears to be excitement with a product. Once you’ve clued into the fact that although he won’t trash talk stuff; he’s just going through the motions to get paid and you can tell.
Before I bought my Ashdown head I actually emailed a YT channel and picked the guys brains about his Ashdown amp (that he talked about on his channel) before buying mine.
