tl;dr: Your ears are your own, so don’t 100% trust anyone else’s, but also don’t hate on anyone for having a different opinion. At the end of the day, it’s your money, your life, so enjoy what you have and use your own opinions to buy what you want.
Even though this thread is only 6 days old, I feel like I’m super late to it just because of how many replies it has gotten. Anyways, I find it funny how so many people who still watch him to this day and/or use his forums talk bad about him since it makes it look like they’re trying to fight people over him and watch his stuff just to add fuel to their hate. Of course, I could be 100% wrong about this and probably am, but it’s just kind of weird how people will continue to partake in something they seem to hate, though I feel it’s a good thing since it helps to keep places like this forum from becoming an echo chamber that only listens to one opinion. And that’s the thing, when it comes to audio, it’s all opinions! We all have different ears, we all have different sources, but we’re all trying to do one thing: enjoy what we’re listening to. “Reviews” on opinion-based things like audio gear will never be factual unless they just strictly read off the product’s info page or read what a graph says, but none of that will matter to you since you’ll hear it in a totally different way from anyone else!
Personally, I got into audiophilia over a decade before I even knew who Zeos was, but I still love his videos because of how he talks about the PRODUCT, not the sound (since in the end, what he hears won’t be what I hear). What I care about in his reviews are his opinions on knobs, wires, machining quality, whether something is simple to use, etc. Since I started watching him in 2020, I’ve only bought one thing because of his recommendations, the Argon Mk3, but I also used other opinions from “reviewers” and users on sites like this to make that purchase.
What I find great about Zeos is that he, and DankPods, reignited my passion for audiophilia and gave me entertainment along the way. I don’t trust anyone other than myself, and I feel like that should be something obvious for most people in this hobby, but apparently it’s not since I see many people in Zeos’s comments who will absent-mindedly purchase something because he recommended it and others who do the same for DMS, DankPods, and other “reviewers” (can I stop putting that word in quotation marks? I think I made my point about reviewers being subjective when it comes to sound). If you want to just spend $50, then buy the KPH30i and Apple USB-A to USB-C dongle and be done with it, if you want to spend $5,000+, then buy equipment worth that much. Listen to it, enjoy it, and return it/sell it if you don’t. Your money, your ears, your life. Don’t let someone else control your life, buy what you want to buy and enjoy it.
P.S. I hope my little rant had a moral to it and wasn’t just useless and mindless rambling. I’ll write a tl;dr for it on the top anyways since I don’t want to confuse anyone with my style of writing. Also, re: the Holo May thing, who really cares? The people who will listen to his advice were most likely not going to spend that much money on a DAC anyways, and the people who will end up buying that DAC won’t let a weirdo on YouTube tell them not to. Not to mention that the people who have the money to spend on such high end devices would most likely still give them a try, even if they took Zeos’s word as gospel, just to hear it themselves.
, I thought it was less due to personal matters.
