Now I was willing to accept this if you wanted something special. Mud tyres or spikes or combination road / gravel tyres or even doing 45° angle corner leans at 80kph down Alpe d'Huez or whatever but surely, SURELY, for just going A to B in an paved enviroment it wouldn't matter?

Yeah no turns out the premium shit does feel great and rolls better. I can never return.

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[–] Chana@hexbear.net 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

IMO with core bicycle components I think "midrange" is usually best. They're more expensive than I'd like them to be but you don't need to spend $100 per tire either (which is what people do pay for the most popular road tire and niche tires). You can usually get very nice tires in the $50 range, definitely when on sale. Nice panaracers, pirellis, Vittorias, continentals, schwalbes. And they'll cost just as much as some of the less nice tires, even!

For another example, you could buy a Chris King headset for $200-$400 or get a solid sealed bearing headset for $40 and the latter will be easily serviceable and not feel different at all. But if you pay $10 for a headset you might get trash bearings or non-round sleeves (or something good if you do careful research).

Or you can get $1200 carbon wheels or $150 lightweight aluminum and probably barely tell the difference. But if you buy $40 wheels on Craigslist there's an 50% chance they're pitted and so the hub needs to be replaced (itself like $50). And it better be almost exactly the same if you want to reuse the spokes. Oh and you need a $150 tool or to pay $50-$100 for a shop to rebuild it, etc etc.

Same applies to frames, pedals, groupsets, saddles, etc etc. IMO the main exceptions are for Chinese OEMs or derivatives. They are often just as good for 1/3 the price but you have to be a big nerd about what you're getting. Like you can get great sealed bearing mtb pedals for like $10 on AliExpress. The "real deal" is functionally identical (sometimes the design was copied from them...) and $60.

I do tend to be careful on the main safety components though, which is basically everything up front: bars, stem, headset, fork, front wheel and tire. If those fail catastrophically it is a big safety risk. Then, I prefer something that's been used and recommended by many people or is a well-known OEM.