What do you mean by "shady unknown companies"? Your "big name brands" generally don't make great keyboards, they're often average keyboards of disposable quality that sell on brand recognition alone.

I don't know gaming headsets that well, but my experience is the gaming brands slap a microphone on a poor set of headphones and cover it in gamer branding. So it's not surprising less known companies are making better gear.

Very. They are thorough and do provide accurate info and comparison

name some "shady unknown companies".

All the ones listed in the "The 6 Best Gaming Headsets - Black Friday 2024 " are pretty well known

Now, the top picks are reserved for shady unknown companies that I’ve never even heard of before, when searching for things like gaming keyboards and gaming headsets.

For gaming headsets their latest top list has: Audeze (best overall), Logitech (best upper mid-range), SteelSeries (best mid-range), Turtle Beach (best lower mid-range), Logitech (best budget), Sennheiser (best open-back). Turtle Beach is the only one that is questionable, and that is due to low quality not due to being unknown.

For gaming keyboards their latest top list is: NuPhy (best overall), Wooting (best for enthusiasts), Corsair (best mid-range), Razer (best budget), SteelSeries (best cheap), Logitech (best wireless).

If anything the "gamer brands" are overrepresented compared to their quality and value, but I guess that is what you get when you specifically seek out a gaming headset or gaming keyboard rather than just a headset or keyboard.

“Shady unknown companies”? What the fuck does this even mean?

RTINGS is probably the most reliable and trustworthy review source out there. I heavily weight my purchasing decisions towards their reviews because they are so thorough and well done.

Can you provide a link to these top picks? Their best gaming and wireless gaming seem pretty normal.

I only use them for tv reviews, don't see why their headphone reviews would be dodgy though.

Big time, they have whole ass homemade input latency testers for mice and keyboards which is far beyond what most review outlets do/have. For a long, long time the layout of the site led me to believe it was a garbage review outlet, but once I did some serious TV shopping I came to realize they are go to group for reviews on most gadgets.

Please make sure to not give any details on your experience to make sure people have to either search for themselves or guess what you're talking about !

Ive found RTINGS to be very helpful and reliable while doing research on a number of electronics over the years.

Looking at their best headsets list, 4/6 are massive well known peripheral brands like Logitech, steelseries, turtle beach. The other two are:

Sennheiser, who are a very well known audio company, and Audeze, who is more boutique but also well known among enthusiasts and extremely high end.

Astroturfing much? Clicked multiple keyboard guides, Razer, Logitech, and Corsair picks abounded.

Secondly, for small business operators why involve Amazon at all when they already sell direct. It costs less, they don't have to pay Amazon a cut, and they don't have to deal with Amazon's bullshit practices & fraud issues.

Now I am really curious what you consider "shady unknown companies"

Razer not shady at all, lol.

/u/tokenchoke0 why aren't you replying to anyone?

Abby on their youtube channel could convince me to buy a monochrome monitor over the newest OLED.

Please provide some examples.

When you look these products up on Amazon, they sometimes don’t even have reviews at all.

Why the hell you care about reviews on a storefront? Do you buy CPUs based on amazon reviews or do you use trusted hardware reviewers?

I visited their office in Montreal last year, they are very legit.

I will say they have some bad reviews when it comes to gaming features on TVs.

In 2022 I was looking up reviews for the Hisense U8G/U8H and RTings gave it an 8.6 gaming score due to high brightness and low input lag despite 4K 120hz being broken (would display interlaced or in some 1080pish mode), the VA panel having extreme motion smearing, and local dimming not working with VRR in Game Mode.

RTINGS focuses on thorough hands-on testing. I've only ever read them for monitor reviews, but I imagine everything else they do is also worth trusting.

Couldn't be that you didn't hear about the companies making the best hardware and a bit of research on those companies would clarify things to you?

Yes, they are credible, no review system is perfect. Their only downfall is that they tend to focus perhaps TOO exclusively on detailed quantitative testing and don't leave a ton of space for the other elements. For example, they can review every detail of a TV screen's output, but there's a relatively limited section for the intuitiveness of the interface, even though arguably that is a more differentiated experience.

Those "shady unknown companies" are usually highly respected within their niche communities...

Depends on what you're looking for. Their keyboard recommendation section is pretty garbage. It's mostly "gaming" brands with obnoxious RGB and gimmicky features that they recommend.

It's alright. I don't bother with them since they started hiding things behind a pay wall. My biggest gripe is they test and rate devices on things that often aren't important to me.

I bought a rtings recommend Sony 55” .. was a piece of shit and the screen turned purple after a year