Business enterprises have to pump out new products when the old ones reach maturity or die out. I am sure SME uses their best engineering resources available to design their new products, new arms. However it would be naive to think that they produce the new arms just because they think they can make a better sounding arm. The main objective of a large established company to introduce a new product is to make money...period. One thing for sure their main objective is certainly different from ours. Very often new product with newer technologies and space age materials are better than old ones. But sometime they are just new products, not necessarily better than previous ones. You put two engineers of different era together I am sure each would favor the sound of his own design. I am not saying the new SME arms are inferior to the 3012R. I haven’t heard any of them beside the 3012R. But I am saying the logic that more advance technology will likely beat out the old one is not absolute. And an opinion of the engineer, the designer is as good as a data point that other users have commented in this thread because all of them are obviously biased one way or another.
For me I find the 3012R gives me great pleasure and enjoyment listening to music as much if not more than my other arms. I like to compare gears just like Bonzo (sometime I even think he enjoys comparing experiences more than listening experiences.) Look at those gears I bought senselessly. They were results of my curiosity. I learned a lot from them. Until now I am not really much interested in knowing or able to write specifically how 3012R differs in sound to SAT or Axiom. I just hear really good sound, enjoy it and not listening analytically. I better leave the job to Bonzo to compare when he visited me. He can say which one has more drive and more “flow” whatever that means...hehe
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Last but not least. If fanboys don’t mean anything sexually, then yes I am ddk’s fanboy...also Gian’s fanboy, MikeL’s fanboy, Christian’s fanboy, Ron’s fanboy, Shane’s fanboy and a few others.
Kind regards,
Tang