What lies beneath?

[microstrip]

microstrip

Care to tell me the differences "true" between High End and "pseudo" High End ... It will also be interesting to name a few brands you consider high end and some that are: "Pseudo"...
Must say you have a gift to distor people post. I made no mention of any particular case in my post yet you wrote:
Where do you see that in my post? What poor cases have I mentioned or posted about? What have I denigrated? Please, if that is not asking too much

FrantzM,

My apologies - I wrongly attributed to you some comments from a previous post I was commenting from another member. No way your post addressed the aspects I referred - my reply had no sense at all. I promise I will be more careful next time.

I have now deleted my post.

 

[Raffles]

There was one company whose products I just had to own an example of, and that was Quad. I read about them, and wanted one of their amplifiers like a child obsessed with some expensive toy. During this phase I studied their 405 power amplifier, and its descendants and I was struck by the fact that it was very elegant and innovative, but also you could see where changes had been made particularly regarding the protection and the way it might fail safely. Early versions had over-simplistic safe operating area protection on the output transistors and this didn't work very well with low impedance speakers. Later, they improved this greatly, still just using a transisor or two and a few resistors, diodes and capacitors. Clearly Quad didn't want to corrupt the output with relay contacts but still wanted to protect the output in case of faults, so first they fitted an SCR crowbar to each channel (and had to mess about with where the fuse on each rail went presumably because of unwanted failure 'sequencing'), but they later came up with a fiendish floating ground power supply that achieved the same thing much more elegantly. Would a tiny boutique company have done all this, or might they simply not have bothered with so much protection?

The hardware is lovely, although they didn't worry too much about 'named brand' components, and Peter Walker the founder famously didn't even bother to listen to his products until they measured right anyway.

There's a really lavish book about Quad (which I bought of course).
http://www.amazon.com/Quad-Closest-Approach-Ken-Kessler/dp/0954574206

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

I think some good points have been made on both sides of this argument and the truth lies somewhere in the middle like it usually does. Having a large company that is ISO certified to the latest ISO standards doesn’t guarantee you a damn thing other than the fact that the company has procedures they can produce when the ISO auditors who are paid to perform the ISO certification audits come around and ask to see them. It doesn’t mean the procedures are worth a damn and it doesn’t mean that people read and follow them. It just means that you have them.

If you have a large company with lots of white coats and Q.C. people, it also means you have lots of overhead that is added to the cost of your products. Having Q.C. people doesn’t guarantee quality products anymore than being ISO certified guarantees anything beyond having procedures in place. I have been to companies that have lost their ‘recipe’ to build products in order to find out what has changed and I have been appalled at some of things I have found in ISO certified companies with a large engineering and Q.C. staff.

Out of all the areas of expertise that you can branch off into as an electrical engineer, one of the easiest areas has to be designing tube audio electronics. It’s just not hard in comparison to other electrical engineering endeavors. Audio engineering has been well understood for over 60 years. Designing components to be flat across the audio band (or even well outside it) is a piece of cake assuming you are designing with SS. Tube amps will never be flat across the audio band because of output transformer limitations. ‘New’ tube amps may have built in hour meters (and that’s a cool feature) and some may have housekeeping circuitry that monitors output tube health, sets bias, and shuts down the amp if it senses a tube is going south, but the basic amplification circuits themselves haven’t changed that much since tube amps first hit the market. The only exceptions I can think of are better quality parts, SS rectifiers, and big capacitor banks in the power supplies that SS rectifiers can push. Those changes are responsible for today’s tube amps having much better bass response than their early predecessors. The fact that we have better quality resistors and much higher quality film coupling caps have also improved the sound of today’s tube amps. But, one could go back and build an early Williamson tube amp circuit and beef up the power supply and use high quality resistors and film caps and have a thoroughly modern sounding tube amp I do believe. To my knowledge, no one has come up with a new type of phase splitter and/or driver circuit that wasn’t invented in the 1940s. I don’t see where tube output stages have changed much either. You are either single-ended Class A, push-pull Class A, or push-pull Class A/B-all of which have been around forever. The biggest difference with output stages that I see is how much feedback is applied with today’s amps.

With regards to the optimization of a company in order to have the ‘correct’ ratio of design engineers, technicians, assembly workers, buyers, technical writers, marketing and sales people, etc., that is what separates the good companies from those that struggle. You can’t have a lone genius designing and building audio gear and have any type of efficiency of scale and any type of a production delivery schedule that would keep you in business.

Now, getting to the point about pro-audio electronics vice high-end electronics is another bag of worms. The argument is being made that pro-audio companies have engineers and large Q.C. staffs that build rugged, reliable, and cheap audio gear that will match or beat high-end audio gear. Of course now the argument has shifted to strictly SS because pro-audio isn’t involved in tube gear (outside of possibly tube microphone preamps).

I can’t tell you whether or not if the high-end SS circuits being designed by today’s best SS engineers are better quality circuits than what is being turned out by the pro-audio companies-although I suspect they are. Companies like Ayre have figured out ways to build SS circuits that are exceptionally linear and require no feedback. I think we are pretty confident that the parts used to build SS high-end gear are more expensive and arguably sound better than the parts used to build relatively mass-market pro-audio gear. I think we can expect the parts used in high-end gear are better matched in terms of tolerances than pro-audio gear. When you build to a price point, compromises have to be made. We can all argue if those compromises are audible. I think the bottom line here is that if you are strictly buying according to specifications and you think specs are the be-all end-all of audio electronics, pro-audio gear is probably real tough to beat at each of their respective price points. Whether or not the pro-audio gear would actually beat out the high-end gear with regards to sound quality in a double-blind, triple-blind, poke your eyes out shoot-out is open for conjecture.

I think you just supported Soundminded's argument. The rest of it, the stuff about ineffective QC or bad QC, or QC done just for ISO auditors might be interesting, but it's another conversation. The stuff at the end about what you can't tell and what we are pretty confident of and what you think we can expect and something about the bottom line is if you are buying strictly according to specs? Did anyone say anything about buying strictly according to specs? I guess that's another conversation as well. Your humble opinion. My mileage may vary.

Tim

 

[mep]

I think you just supported Soundminded's argument. The rest of it, the stuff about ineffective QC or bad QC, or QC done just for ISO auditors might be interesting, but it's another conversation. The stuff at the end about what you can't tell and what we are pretty confident of and what you think we can expect and something about the bottom line is if you are buying strictly according to specs? Did anyone say anything about buying strictly according to specs? I guess that's another conversation as well. Your humble opinion. My mileage may vary.

Tim

You either misread or misinterpreted some of the things I said. I never said Q.C. was done for the sake of ISO auditors. I said that procedures would be produced for ISO auditors. It’s one of the first things they ask for when they hit the production floor during an audit. And I meant procedures used by production/repair personnel who are building a new item or repairing an existing item. I also didn't say that people buy strictly according to specs, but it sure influences lots of decisions.

 

[microstrip]

There's a really lavish book about Quad (which I bought of course).
http://www.amazon.com/Quad-Closest-Approach-Ken-Kessler/dp/0954574206

It is really a great book. Happily I bought if directly from the factory at a decent price sometime ago! The quoted prices are insane.

 

[Bill Hart]

excellent post there, MEP.

 

[Bill Hart]

There was one company whose products I just had to own an example of, and that was Quad. I read about them, and wanted one of their amplifiers like a child obsessed with some expensive toy. During this phase I studied their 405 power amplifier, and its descendants and I was struck by the fact that it was very elegant and innovative, but also you could see where changes had been made particularly regarding the protection and the way it might fail safely. Early versions had over-simplistic safe operating area protection on the output transistors and this didn't work very well with low impedance speakers. Later, they improved this greatly, still just using a transisor or two and a few resistors, diodes and capacitors. Clearly Quad didn't want to corrupt the output with relay contacts but still wanted to protect the output in case of faults, so first they fitted an SCR crowbar to each channel (and had to mess about with where the fuse on each rail went presumably because of unwanted failure 'sequencing'), but they later came up with a fiendish floating ground power supply that achieved the same thing much more elegantly. Would a tiny boutique company have done all this, or might they simply not have bothered with so much protection?

The hardware is lovely, although they didn't worry too much about 'named brand' components, and Peter Walker the founder famously didn't even bother to listen to his products until they measured right anyway.

There's a really lavish book about Quad (which I bought of course).
http://www.amazon.com/Quad-Closest-Approach-Ken-Kessler/dp/0954574206

I am a big fan of Quad. I think i read somewhere- perhaps it's in the book- that they sold a staggering number of their early solid state amps for commercial use.

 

[terryj]

Ok, so what would be considered a fair final price for a component when based 'solely' on the cost of the parts used? I'd imagine..well actually I don't know.

There could be some interesting answers come up. For all I know any small increases in cost has to be exponentially priced to recoup that small extra outlay when 'the entire audio market is looked at. But *we* are a small subset of the entire whole, yet still with competing manufacturers which may again mean exponential ratios of final cost/parts.

Would anyone hear honestly buy the same 'unit' if the bling were absent? If the bling was not there, would it have even made the audition list? In other words, what role do *we* play in all of this?

 

[FrantzM]

mep

Thoughtful, well written post. I slightly differ from your point of view on a few things. I am not suggesting that people should buy on specifications only. I don't.. having repeated ad infinitum that I have found myself attracted to gear that measure well and some that don't ... We, audiophiles, listen to gear to form an opinion but what part of this opinion is pre-formed? If I were to ask many here what amplifier they think will sound better a Krell or a Crown? Most including myself will go for the Krell without having auditioned the Crown. The truth is that most of us don't have any idea how a Pro amp would sound in our system. We are not interested and have in more than one ways made up our mind about Pro amps. It is at that level very , very difficult to remove our biases. Not saying that Pro amps are better than High End one but for the most part, we don't know.. The last time I have seen a Pro amp compared to a High End was when in the early day, TAS (HP) compared a Crown to a Phase Linear. As an aside when I was studying in NY in 1984 I remember seeing a Crown amp in Lyric front window ... To come back to my point. We make a lot of assumption and they color our point of view.. We know it but we resist fiercely any protocol that would help us weed out the contenders from the pretenders. Same with pro speakers of which there are some decent even outstanding ones. I like for example what can be obtained with the Makcie 824 and have been recently shocked by a cheap Behringer active speaker less than $400 the pair ... If there is an area where we are resigning ourselves to accept Pro products it is DAC where they routinely beat up most audiophile products in their price range ( I hate that term ) e.g the Mytek you have or the Korg .. or the Weiss version of the DAC 202 (can't remember the model #) which cost almost $2000 less in the Pro (and virtually same version, less the audiophile-approved thick faceplate) ...There are more products than I can remember, in the Pro area that would give many audiophiles DAC a serious run for the money.

For the High End Industry it is as well that such comparisons are never conducted. They are not encouraged anyway nor do we, audiophiles, ask for them. As for the quality parts ... The Pro people can have access to them and the volume they would purchase would guarantee them much better price and these parts companies ever lasting prosperity... If I were to take that example to the Auto Industry, I sincerely believe that if it comes to build great performance cars the large manufacturers are perfectly capable when they put their mind to it or that there is a clear value to it... Renault, Honda, Toyota , Audi, etc. Do we really think that if Sony , Pioneer, even Crown if they were to put their mind to it wouldn't produce great products fully competitive with High End .. Well Pioneer has, that's what TAD is and Crown is owned by The Harman Group makers of Mark Levinson gears ... We audiophiles are a funny group we usually reject name tags that don't imply our notion of High End Audio i-e small cottage-like manufacturers so they are usually cast away... We are not alone in this thinking , that's why Toyota luxury car division is Lexus and that of Nissan, Infinity ... Perception , perception...

 

[Bill Hart]

mep

Thoughtful, well written post. I slightly differ from your point of view on a few things. I am not suggesting that people should buy on specifications only. I don't.. having repeated ad infinitum that I have found myself attracted to gear that measure well and some that don't ... We, audiophiles, listen to gear to form an opinion but what part of this opinion is pre-formed? If I were to ask many here what amplifier they think will sound better a Krell or a Crown? Most including myself will go for the Krell without having auditioned the Crown. The truth is that most of us don't have any idea how a Pro amp would sound in our system. We are not interested and have in more than one ways made up our mind about Pro amps. It is at that level very , very difficult to remove our biases. Not saying that Pro amps are better than High End one but for the most part, we don't know.. The last time I have seen a Pro amp compared to a High End was when in the early day, TAS (HP) compared a Crown to a Phase Linear. As an aside when I was studying in NY in 1984 I remember seeing a Crown amp in Lyric front window ... To come back to my point. We make a lot of assumption and they color our point of view.. We know it but we resist fiercely any protocol that would help us weed out the contender from the pretender. Same with pro speakers of which there are some decent even outstanding ones. I like for example what can be obtained with the Makcie 824 and have been recently shocked by a cheap Behringer active speaker less than $400 the pair ... If there is an area where we are resigning ourselves to accept Pro products it is DAC where they routinely beat up most audiophile products in their price range ( I hate that term ) e.g the Mytek you have or the Korg .. or the Weiss version of the DAC 202 (can't remember the model #) which cost almost $2000 less in the Pro (and virtually same version, les the audiophile approved thick faceplate) or more model than I can remember, in the Pro area that would give many audiophiles DAC a serious run for the money.

For the High End Industry it is as well that such comparisons are never conducted. They are not encouraged anyway nor do we, audiophiles, ask for them. As for the quality parts ... The Pro people have access to them and the volume they would purchase would guarantee them much better price and these companies ever lasting prosperity... If I were to take that example to the Auto Industry, I sincerely believe that if it comes to build great performance cars the large manufacturers are perfectly capable when they put their mind to it or that there is a clear value to it... Renault, Honda, Toyota , Audi, etc. Do we really think that if Sony , Pioneer, even Crown if they were to put their mind to it wouldn't produce great products fully competitive with High End .. Well Pioneer has, that's what TAD is and Crown is owned by The Harman Group makers of Mark Levinson gears ... We audiophiles are a funny group we usually reject name tags that don't imply our notion of High End Audio i-e small cottage-like manufacturers so they are usually cast away... We are not alone in this thinking , that's why Toyota luxury car division is Lexus and that of Nissan, Infinity ... Perception , perception...

Franz- as I mentioned earlier, I did use and work with some of the Crown stuff back in the early 70's. The preamp (IC 150) was very transistory sounding even for its time. I compared it with a host of pieces, including the long-forgotten Quintessence (solid state, which I owned) and ARC SP 3-a-1 (which I also owned). Both of the latter, by 1970's standards, sounded far better over the dynamic speakers of the time, including the AR LST. (We had Magnepans around then too, but I think we were only 'allowed' to use them with ARC stuff). I also seem to recall that the smaller Crown amp, the 150, sounded better than the DC 300a, but that may be a twist of memory. I do recall thinking that my Phase Linear 700 at the time sounded better than the Crown pieces, but for reliability, I would certainly have counted on the Crown, not the Phase Linear.
I have no idea what the Crown stuff sounds like today. I would imagine for a big PA system, it would be dandy.
I certainly didn't buy the Lamm ML2 because of bling. (Well, maybe 'reverse bling' -it is so utilitarian, it must sound good, and frankly, it does).

 

[JackD201]

Ok, so what would be considered a fair final price for a component when based 'solely' on the cost of the parts used? I'd imagine..well actually I don't know.

There could be some interesting answers come up. For all I know any small increases in cost has to be exponentially priced to recoup that small extra outlay when 'the entire audio market is looked at. But *we* are a small subset of the entire whole, yet still with competing manufacturers which may again mean exponential ratios of final cost/parts.

Would anyone hear honestly buy the same 'unit' if the bling were absent? If the bling was not there, would it have even made the audition list? In other words, what role do *we* play in all of this?

We play the role of final arbiter.

Here's my thing. I believe everybody has the right to put a price on his own work. He can give it away for free or price himself out of the market. It is the individual's call. It doesn't matter what he makes.

So here we have a company making pres that supposedly sound very good to a particular set of people with very few parts and a very large price tag. Personally, I am not a parts counter. My preamp is very minimalist but my amps definitely are not. It's how they sound in a system context that matters to me, taking into account of course trade-offs that are unavoidable. So, if this thing from CF did work well in my system (fits my preferences) and I could afford it, I don't care if it has few parts. If I can't afford it too bad for me and too bad for the guy who priced it that way. If I really liked it, there's always the used market anyway where the maker makes squat.

If I am pushing Soundminded, it's only because I don't know from what high horse he is coming from. He seems to have us arranged in two ranks: idiot objectivists and idiot subjectivists. When the fact is we are all cognizant of the trade offs we are constrained to make. I want to know what trade-offs he's made. Where he's worked tells me nothing.

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

You either misread or misinterpreted some of the things I said. I never said Q.C. was done for the sake of ISO auditors. I said that procedures would be produced for ISO auditors. It’s one of the first things they ask for when they hit the production floor during an audit. And I meant procedures used by production/repair personnel who are building a new item or repairing an existing item. I also didn't say that people buy strictly according to specs, but it sure influences lots of decisions.

I evidently misunderstood your comments about ISO. My apologies.

Tim

 

[Bill Hart]

We play the role of final arbiter.

Here's my thing. I believe everybody has the right to put a price on his own work. He can give it away for free or price himself out of the market. It is the individual's call. It doesn't matter what he makes.

So here we have a company making pres that supposedly sound very good to a particular set of people with very few parts and a very large price tag. Personally, I am not a parts counter. My preamp is very minimalist but my amps definitely are not. It's how they sound in a system context that matters to me, taking into account of course trade-offs that are unavoidable. So, if this thing from CF did work well in my system (fits my preferences) and I could afford it, I don't care if it has few parts. If I can't afford it too bad for me and too bad for the guy who priced it that way. If I really liked it, there's always the used market anyway where the maker makes squat.

If I am pushing Soundminded, it's only because I don't know from what high horse he is coming from. He seems to have us arranged in two ranks: idiot objectivists and idiot subjectivists. When the fact is we are all cognizant of the trade offs we are constrained to make. I want to know what trade-offs he's made. Where he's worked tells me nothing.

Jack: that's not fair. I am a general idiot.

 

[Raffles]

It is really a great book. Happily I bought if directly from the factory at a decent price sometime ago! The quoted prices are insane.

In the UK you can still buy it new for £50 (about $80).

 

[microstrip]

mep

Thoughtful, well written post. I slightly differ from your point of view on a few things. I am not suggesting that people should buy on specifications only. I don't.. having repeated ad infinitum that I have found myself attracted to gear that measure well and some that don't ... We, audiophiles, listen to gear to form an opinion but what part of this opinion is pre-formed? If I were to ask many here what amplifier they think will sound better a Krell or a Crown? Most including myself will go for the Krell without having auditioned the Crown. The truth is that most of us don't have any idea how a Pro amp would sound in our system. We are not interested and have in more than one ways made up our mind about Pro amps. It is at that level very , very difficult to remove our biases. Not saying that Pro amps are better than High End one but for the most part, we don't know.. The last time I have seen a Pro amp compared to a High End was when in the early day, TAS (HP) compared a Crown to a Phase Linear. As an aside when I was studying in NY in 1984 I remember seeing a Crown amp in Lyric front window ... To come back to my point. We make a lot of assumption and they color our point of view.. We know it but we resist fiercely any protocol that would help us weed out the contenders from the pretenders. Same with pro speakers of which there are some decent even outstanding ones. I like for example what can be obtained with the Makcie 824 and have been recently shocked by a cheap Behringer active speaker less than $400 the pair ... If there is an area where we are resigning ourselves to accept Pro products it is DAC where they routinely beat up most audiophile products in their price range ( I hate that term ) e.g the Mytek you have or the Korg .. or the Weiss version of the DAC 202 (can't remember the model #) which cost almost $2000 less in the Pro (and virtually same version, less the audiophile-approved thick faceplate) ...There are more products than I can remember, in the Pro area that would give many audiophiles DAC a serious run for the money.

For the High End Industry it is as well that such comparisons are never conducted. They are not encouraged anyway nor do we, audiophiles, ask for them. As for the quality parts ... The Pro people can have access to them and the volume they would purchase would guarantee them much better price and these parts companies ever lasting prosperity... If I were to take that example to the Auto Industry, I sincerely believe that if it comes to build great performance cars the large manufacturers are perfectly capable when they put their mind to it or that there is a clear value to it... Renault, Honda, Toyota , Audi, etc. Do we really think that if Sony , Pioneer, even Crown if they were to put their mind to it wouldn't produce great products fully competitive with High End .. Well Pioneer has, that's what TAD is and Crown is owned by The Harman Group makers of Mark Levinson gears ... We audiophiles are a funny group we usually reject name tags that don't imply our notion of High End Audio i-e small cottage-like manufacturers so they are usually cast away... We are not alone in this thinking , that's why Toyota luxury car division is Lexus and that of Nissan, Infinity ... Perception , perception...

FrantzM,

High end is much more than manufacturing good audio products. IMHO, we can not see only this side of the industry. You must have distributors, good dealers and a network to keep the system working. If no one in the high-end community is prepared to handle a device it is not high-end. You must expect systematic good results with this piece of equipment - a pro amplifier can sound good in your system, but in order to be accepted it must have been scrutinized in a wide environment, with other high-end equipment. Individual, non proved, claims will not change the situation.

I think audiophiles are much wiser than we can expect. We create an image of the typical audiophile from a few of us that share and debate our opinions in a net forum, but the great majority are much more reasonable than us and just choose and listen to their equipments without our excessive passion. And are not obsessed by challenges ...

High-end is a long experience, with some myths and many truths. A few people want the good thinks and dislike the not so good. But they must co-exist.

BTW, what you say about DACs is true and could be expected. Professional manufacturers have a much larger and longer experience with these type of devices and interfaces, while high-end was enclosed around the CD format. High-end is still learning about how to handle the HIRez and virtual music formats - the best they have come from manufacturers that had experience whit the professional world, such as Playback. However, the best CD reproduction I have listened to came from a dedicated high-end CD system, and most of it, high-end has shown in the past that it can learn fast ...

Some one once said that all humans must have a revolutionary side. It seems some of us would like to revolutionize the high-end.

PS - I hope I am not distorting any of your views!

 

[JackD201]

Jack: that's not fair. I am a general idiot.

Call me Admiral Idiot, General. LOL.

 

[DaveyF]

We play the role of final arbiter.

Here's my thing. I believe everybody has the right to put a price on his own work. He can give it away for free or price himself out of the market. It is the individual's call. It doesn't matter what he makes.

So here we have a company making pres that supposedly sound very good to a particular set of people with very few parts and a very large price tag. Personally, I am not a parts counter. My preamp is very minimalist but my amps definitely are not. It's how they sound in a system context that matters to me, taking into account of course trade-offs that are unavoidable. So, if this thing from CF did work well in my system (fits my preferences) and I could afford it, I don't care if it has few parts. If I can't afford it too bad for me and too bad for the guy who priced it that way. If I really liked it, there's always the used market anyway where the maker makes squat.

.

Good points Jack. However,I do not think that anyone has said or implied that the manufacturer of CF can't ask whatever they want to for their gear. IF people are willing to pay for the product at whatever price the manufacturer feels should be asked, then more power to them, IMHO.
When we opened the top of the preamp, truth be told, I was expecting to see a lot of open space, as this is what the manufacturer is using as his claim to fame ( which is exactly what I did see). What I wasn't expecting, was my companion's statement about the quality and cost of the components. Since I am not cognizant of the cost/quality of these parts, ( and will assume that some of you who have posted are), then I cannot state whether he was right or wrong. BUT, if we assume that he knows what he is talking of, and I have no reason to believe that he doesn't (particularly since he has built several amps and preamps himself and works part time as a repair tech) then it should call into question two points...1) Do we as a'philes have the right to expect a certain level of cost and quality of parts for the high price we are paying for a piece of gear, or should the ultimate sound that said piece gives us,regardless of build, be sufficient to justify the/any price asked? and 2) How much of the hype that is built up around the product be construed as contributing to the value and therefore price that we are expected to pay?

Remember, I thought and have said the CF line stage was a good sounding piece.

 

[JackD201]

Hi Davey,

I think if there was such a thing in the here and now as a perfect preamp, something everybody in the world could agree on as the best and that cost less, CF and their ilk would have a problem. As it stands, wire with gain still only an ideal and all, what we have is their vision of what is the best and they are charging a pretty hefty sum for it. If your friend says he can duplicate what CF has done for less, sure maybe he could but he now has something to anchor his work on. He's copying not creating the same way a street artist could get pretty close to a Van Gogh. He's short cutted the work hours/ labor cost that went into making the original. He's reverse engineering in other words. If he can do it with a CF then he could probably do it with a CAT, an ARC, a Lamm or anything else with more parts too. He'd just have to put in more time as the part counts go up.

The distortion in prices come mainly from the distribution models and bling, true, but a part of it is also the intellectual property value attached. It's cheaper to copy than to create.

 

[DaveyF]

Jack, that's all very true and well put. My companion that day ( not really a friend) did bring up a very interesting observation IMO, but at the end of day, that's all it was, an observation. Assuming that he was 100% correct about the parts cost and quality, it didn't seem to take away from the performance/perception of this gear....or did it??

 

[JackD201]

I guess that's something only an experienced circuit designer can answer, which I certainly am not.