I'm currently the proud owner of an Apeks XTX200 regulator set (FSR 1st stage, XTX200 2nd, XTX40 octopus). It's generally a good piece of kit, but I'm not very happy with it for two reasons:
- At my regular breathing rate, both membranes make an annoying fart sound. I've never experienced this on my other, much cheaper regulators (Aqualung Calypso, Cressi AC2). Cleaning, servicing, changing the membranes doesn't help.
- It's too overcompensated for my taste - above the 5m (~15ft) line I have to work for the air, below 18m (60ft) it actively tries to blow me up. I can adjust it depending on the depth but it's inconvenient. According to my LDS there's nothing that can be done about this.
With breathing being something that I rather enjoy doing, I'm willing to spend a bit more on high-end gear. So far I've only heard great things about Poseidon, and the Xstream Deep Mk3 looks fantastic on paper.
The thing is that the next Poseidon dealer is a three-hour drive away, so testing it before I spend the better part of 1 1/2 grand is not possible. Does anybody happen to have had a chance to compare the two, or other experience with Poseidon gear?
I actually consider this to be (mostly) a good thing. Within those that walk away from reddit, I expect the ratio of content creators vs. content consumers to be way above average. So if we get most of the people who used to make Reddit a great source of food for thought, and spez gets to keep the vast majority of cat video watchers, that's not a bad deal at all.