Why I Quit Audio Reviews: The “Pro” Reviews are Scams

I’m taking a different approach today to explain why this website (and YouTube channel) has gone through a massive identity crisis and why I’ve stepped away from reviewing audio gear.

This pivot is why my channel has had an identity crisis. Even with nearly 100,000 subscribers, my view counts can be low because I’ve switched lanes a couple of times. But I’m sticking to this now. I want to give people real consumer tech advice, privacy education, and tutorials that help them make informed decisions.

MKBHD

I’ve called out trillion-dollar corporations like Microsoft before, but now I’m focusing on the YouTubers who have ruined audio reviews. They put in zero effort while creators like me were grinding. Look a MKBHD’s review of the XM6; it has 4.6 million views. One of the first things he mentions is being happy that the Mark 6s can fold again.

Whether a headphone folds or not is completely subjective. Using that as a primary pillar of a review while getting millions of views for it is exactly the kind of low-effort content that pushed me out of the space and back into the technical work I actually care about.

One of the biggest issues with these high-profile reviews is the focus on subjective preferences as if they are objective flaws. For instance, MKBHD is a stickler for headphones being collapsible. The problem with a folding design is that it introduces mechanical weak points. The XM series already has a reputation for being somewhat fragile, and adding more hinges only makes them weaker.

I travel frequently, and I’ve never found the non-folding design of the XM5s to be an issue. You want your headphones accessible whether you’re in a cab, waiting at the airport, or on the plane. If you use the carrying case, you can easily pack socks, cables, or adapters into the extra space. Labelling the lack of a folding hinge as a “con” without explaining the trade-off in durability is misleading. It’s a personal opinion, not a technical failure.

Then there is the charging cable. MKBHD has spent years preaching “USB-C everything,” yet he completely glosses over the fact that Sony is still including a USB-A to USB-C cable (he said nothing to note about it, literally). Most modern laptops especially MacBooks and Ultrabooks and almost all phone chargers are purely USB-C now. Including a USB-A to USB-C cable means most users will need an adapter just to charge their headphones.

It is a bizarre oversight for someone who usually focuses on port standards. It makes you wonder if these details get overlooked because the product was provided for free for an early review. When you’re a consumer paying your own money, these “minor” inconveniences—like fragile hinges and outdated cables—are the things that actually matter.

One of the biggest issues with these high-profile reviews is the lack of real-world testing. These headphones are incredibly expensive nearly $600 in Canada and yet the “best tech reviewer in the world” doesn’t even bother to replicate a noisy environment for a microphone test. In every one of my reviews, I made it a point to test mics in cafes or windy situation because that’s what a consumer actually experiences. People shouldn’t have to guess if their $600 purchase will sound like garbage on a professional call.

There is also a massive lack of accountability when it comes to battery life. MKBHD spent about two seconds on it, simply repeating Sony’s claim of 30 hours. When I reviewed the XM5s, I spent significant time actually testing those claims. Manufacturers aren’t always accurate; sometimes the battery lasts less, and sometimes it lasts longer, which is a huge selling point. Furthermore, a real review should tell you how long the battery lasts when you turn off power-hungry features like Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) or transparency mode.

It’s easy to put together a video with fancy camera angles and a full studio team, but that isn’t a replacement for technical depth. He never clarifies that he isn’t an audio specialist, yet millions of people make buying decisions based on his observations. My pivot to cyber security and IT was fuelled by this exact frustration: I’d rather provide deep, technical, and honest advice than compete with “rich and famous” influencers who just read spec sheets over B-roll.

The fact that someone who travels as much as MKBHD ignores battery testing is almost unbelievable. When you are travelling dealing with cabs, airport security, and long-haul flights charging becomes a logistical nightmare. A six-hour flight can easily turn into a 20-hour excursion with cab rides to the airport, waiting for plane boarding, flying, waiting for luggage, going through customs, and cab ride to a hotel. The last thing you have the mental capacity for when you’re jet-lagged or heading to a conference is worrying about your headphones dying because you didn’t know the real-world recharge time.

He doesn’t mention charging speed because he clearly didn’t test it. It seems he got the headphones early through an NDA and rushed the review out just to be the first to hit the millions of views. He didn’t wear them long enough with glasses to check for pressure points, and he certainly didn’t push the battery to see if Sony’s 30-hour claim actually holds up under real conditions.

Even worse, he claimed there was only a one-year gap between the XM5 and the XM6. The XM5 actually came out in 2022—that’s a three-year gap. He has an entire studio team that should be verifying these facts, especially when his own channel posted the XM5 review three years ago. It shows that the priority isn’t accuracy or consumer education; it’s just getting “fancy camera angles” out to an audience that will love the video regardless of how mediocre or factually incorrect it is.

This Is Tech Today

Then you have creators like “This Is Tech Today,” who feels the need to announce he’s an audio engineer in every single video. If you’re truly an expert in your field, you don’t have to overcompensate by mentioning your credentials constantly. I’ve been a director of IT and security and working in the industry for over a decade, but I don’t start every video by listing my resume. I let the quality of the technical advice speak for itself. His reviews are some of the worst I’ve seen, to the point where I genuinely doubt his experience. The evidence is right there in his videos.

His headphone sound samples make no sense. The idea of providing “sound samples” for headphones on YouTube is one of the most logically flawed concepts in tech reviewing, and seeing a self-proclaimed “audio engineer” do it is genuinely embarrassing. It’s a chain of degradation: the sound goes from the headphone, into a microphone, through editing software, gets compressed by YouTube’s algorithms, and finally plays through *your* speakers or earbuds. Your hardware cannot magically replicate the frequency response of a different pair of $500 headphones. It’s a placebo for the audience, and while people in the comments seem to love it, it’s technically meaningless.

Furthermore, his claims about glasses and Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) are nonsensical. He claims that wearing glasses doesn’t interfere with sound or ANC performance, but then adds a “your mileage may vary” disclaimer to avoid criticism. As an IT professional who deals with technical specifications, I can tell you that physics doesn’t work that way.

Every single pair of over-ear headphones I have ever tested including the XM6 (which I tested in store) suffers when the seal is broken. When you wear glasses, the frames create a physical gap between the ear cup cushion and your head. This causes:

• Bass Leakage: Lower frequencies immediately lose impact because they require a sealed chamber to resonate properly.
• ANC Degradation: The entire point of ANC is to create an airtight seal so the microphones can accurately cancel external noise. If air (and sound) is leaking in through a gap created by glasses, the ANC performance is compromised.

The fact that he glosses over this proves he didn’t do proper long-term testing. He likely rushed the video out the moment the NDA lifted to catch the wave of views, just like MKBHD. These reviewers are prioritizing speed and “aesthetic” content over the actual testing and consumer experience.

Again, I don’t try to be really super mean, but the fact that he keeps touting as an audio engineer, but he can’t notice these simple things is really embarrassing. I can’t believe people actually eat up everything he says.

And here, to prove my point, one person’s YouTube comment along with 597 people have agreed with a thumbs up, “You are actually the best audio reviewer because we can actually notice the difference through your video.” Again, you cannot do that unless you’re wearing the XM5s when he samples XM5s, and when you’re wearing the XM6s when he’s sampling XM6. The audio sample makes no sense.

He mentions that the battery life is the same between each model (XM5 and XM6) with 30 hours of music playback with ANC on and 40 hours with off. That does not sound correct. With ANC on and transparency mode on, I did average close to 30 hours on the XM5 with what Sony claimed. Okay, cool. But with transparency mode and ANC off, I averaged 35 hours. How did he get 40 hours? Where did he get that number?

So going to the official website for the Sony XM5s because I didn’t review the XM6. I want to be fair and neutral here if I’m calling someone out. But I reviewed the XM5s. And with noise cancelling and transparency mode off, I averaged 35 hours, he said 40 hours. How is there a five-hour difference between mine and his? Well, if you look at the battery specifications of the XM5s, noise cancelling on 30 hours. Okay, I averaged almost the same thing and that’s what he claimed. With noise cancelling off 40 hours battery. That’s why his number is five hours difference from mine. He didn’t actually test the battery. He just read whatever is on the specification sheet.

This guy’s a scam. So what happens is he signed an NDA, he got it early. We know because he released the video instantly, right? I don’t think he had enough time to test the battery. And this is one of the biggest problems I faced as a reviewer when I was reviewing audio gear. In this situation, if the battery with noise cancelling, I would run it nonstop until the battery died. I would let it run on my laptop and play music and just walk away with noise cancelling on.

And of course, then I would say, okay, it lasted about 30 hours, that’s correct. But when I did it with noise cancelling off, it lasted 35 hours. But to run it nonstop together, that’s almost 70 hours Sony claim, right? Total claim of 65 hours what I got on my testing. That is a lot of time. That’s almost three days where I can’t really do anything. I can test some audio and change songs and write my script up, but I’m kind of stuck. I can’t do camera angles and all this other testing because if I touch it, it’ll pause the music by accident and ruin the battery test. That’s why my reviews take forever when I review audio gear. This guy got it done immediately with all his nonsensical tricks because he just wanted to be first on the internet like MKBHD.

It’s all facade information he’s giving. He tries to create this “simulated cafe environment,” but it’s basically nonsensical trolling. He’s holding a speaker directly in front of the headphones to mimic a crowd, but that’s not how audio physics works. If you’re an “audio engineer,” you should know that ambient noise in a cafe is omni-directional—it’s surrounding you, not firing at your face from a single point. When I did my mic tests, I made sure the sound was immersive because that’s the only way to see if the noise-cancelling microphones can actually isolate a human voice from the background chatter.

This guy spends 24 minutes doing “professional” testing just to convince people he’s an expert. It’s a rush job for views, plain and simple. But he’s not even the worst. There are people on YouTube who are far more influential and do even less of their own work, like Linus (of Linus Tech Tips) on the ShortCircuit channel.

Linus Media Group (LMG)

One of the biggest issues with Linus is that he’s essentially just a host now; he doesn’t actually test the products himself. This has been called out in interviews with his own staff. But it goes deeper than just being a hands-off boss the guy has been caught in some serious lies. Louis Rossmann has ripped into him for always playing the victim and shifting blame, even though he’s incredibly wealthy and successful.

Then you have the evidence from Gamers Nexus, which was a total disaster for LMG’s credibility. They exposed how his benchmark numbers for graphics cards and other hardware were often just flat-out wrong. And the Billet Labs situation was the perfect example of his “quantity over quality” approach. They sent him a prototype GPU cooler designed for a 3090 Ti. Instead of testing it on the right card, he threw it on the wrong card, claimed it was garbage, and then instead of returning the one-of-a-kind prototype, his company auctioned it off without permission.

When you prioritise making a videos over doing the actual work, you end up hurting small companies and giving consumers bad advice. It’s why I can’t stand the “trust me, bro” culture in tech reviews. If you aren’t doing the due diligence, you’re just a salesman with a high-end camera.

He didn’t even apologise for ruining that startup’s reputation. After trashing their prototype because he used the wrong hardware, he sold it off instead of returning it, then tried to hide behind “it was for charity.” It’s just awful behaviour, and Gamers Nexus documented the whole thing. The quality of information on his channels is just as bad. I remember a review of a PC-on-a-stick where they never even plugged the thing in; they just held it and talked about it the entire time.

Now he’s talking about audio gear, which he clearly isn’t an expert in though based on the evidence from Louis Rossman and his own staff, I’d argue he isn’t really an expert in anything. He just takes credit and spouts nonsense, but because he’s rich and famous, people eat it up. This video is even sponsored by Sony, so here we go: another marketing piece masquerading as a review.

His performance in the video is so fake you can see right through it. He’s claiming that even if you don’t put the headphones on properly over your ear the built-in microphones will magically compensate and boost the bass. It sounds like he’s just reading a Sony marketing script. He’s trying to play it both ways filming it like a “first look” unboxing but then dropping lines about “our testing” and “labs.”

Then he gets to the glasses part and acts like it’s some revolutionary discovery. He says the bass compensation is “super cool” because it accounts for people with glasses who can’t get a good seal. This is exactly what I mean by fake expertise. As an IT pro, I know that software can try to compensate all it wants, but physics wins. If you have a physical gap in your seal, your ANC and your low-end response (bass) are objectively compromised. Instead of warning people about the reality of using these with glasses, he’s just acting as a hype man for a sponsored feature. It’s not a review; it’s a commercial.

It is baffling that a company such as LMG with over a hundred employees didn’t think to just walk across the office and ask someone with glasses to try them on. He has a massive staff, and many of them wear glasses or have different hairstyles that would impact the seal (they’ve been in his videos many times). For all this talk of “lab testing,” they didn’t even bother with a basic focus group of their own colleagues.

They commented in their own video that they didn’t have pricing ready for the video. The reality is they didn’t have pricing info because they rushed the video out before the official launch. They are infamous for prioritising quantity over quality, and his own staff has admitted that in behind-the-scenes interviews. It’s an assembly line for content. They ignored basic consumer questions—like long-term comfort for people with glasses—because it didn’t fit into their fast-paced production schedule.

Even with more resources than MKBHD, nobody on that team stopped to say, “Hey, maybe we should actually test these claims about bass compensation.” It’s a missed opportunity to give real advice, but that’s what happens when you’re a mid-sized enterprise focused on being the first to post a sponsored “unboxing.”

The Solution

I always try to leave you with a solution. Since I’m no longer reviewing audio gear and focusing on IT and cyber security, I recommend checking out Sound Guys. Their review of the XM6 was actually decent and touched on the technical points that matter.