Thats only true for some brands and models but most noobs wont know that, in general most equipment that's expansive is almost a guarantee for high quality. I say almost because eventualy the whole setup sums up the real quality, all gear in the chain creates that. It implies that when having a certain degree of quality in your setup ( lets say a Soundcraft folio spirit, on a budget tip ), a behringer mic pre-amp would already reduce the quality of the mixer. The soundcraft could easily benefit from a processing unit from the Focusrite platinum range, also in the budget range. Behringer should only use behringer, they have some oke gear but nothing that would benefit a producer's studio, home or not.
Some brands you can blindly if and when you know it fits in the signal chain you have in mind, take the Focusrite red series, dont ask what is does or how they do it but anything will sound better through it, even in bypass. Lexicon is always the best reverb and Eventide have the best alround fx units. I think one of the biggest demand for any good piece of audio gear is the noise floor or signal to noise ratio because in the signal chain you dont want to go below the output level of the first piece of gear in the chain. If yould go below that amount dB you'd get distortion and yould lose preservation of the original signal. So always look at the specs of any piece of gear that has a A/D - D/A converter, you'll find that cheesy gear wouldnt mention SNR cuz it's low anyway meaning you'll go into distortion much quicker ( to give an example, emu 1212M=120dB snr. / realtek ac97 has 90, the HDA version has 100 ). Other qualities less avaible is true bit rate, most specs of gear in the digital realm can state number of bits in reference to a certain standards, 16/18/20/24/43/ bit but benchmarks will point out that their factual performance is lower, only few brands achieve good spec on both bitrate/snr but again, they are expensive ( but sometimes embedded into semi budget gear ). Like Apogee embeds technologie in all sorts of equipment involving I/O, signal processing in general.
nothin fancy , dont care for the name, i like them crisp and slightly baggy but not too big)
