This brings the question, are there some amps that are designed and built without budget considerations? Of course there are. Those amps are beyond the means of the majority of posters here. That's the way it is. For those who dispute this, take a look at the Blowtorch preamplifier. There are others, both pre and power amplifiers. .
I can tell you from personal experience in the high tech tele-data comm design, engineering, manufacturing and distribution business (companies you know by name) that there were plenty of: no holds barred, no cost too high, never enough engineers or custom ASICs and new from the ground up operating systems projects that were colossal company killing turds.
The turds were typically the children of someone in senior management who was deprived of both a lemon-aid stand and a Radio Shack electronics learning kit as a child, so they possessed neither business acumen nor experience from garage or basement tinkering with electronics.
Once promoted into a position where they had real power, they tinkered without budget or any customers who were remotely interested in their wet dream turd.
The biggest turd that I saw cost more than one Trillion in failed acquisitions and probably another 500 million spent on in house engineering for a product that no one on the planet wanted or could use even if they were given the product free with free installation.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On the flip side, one of the things that is drilled into the heads of engineers in school, and a lot of companies, is to "cost-optimize" the design;... so they spend a lot of time driving pennies out of their final design which is time consuming; and for just a few pennies more you could have used the best components with no material effect on cost. Most companies waste more in engineering time cost then they save by optimizing. Plus the product ends up late to market. There is product cost, then there is total cost. My teams products had by far the lowest total cost in the company.
Since my products had ridiculously good margins, I asked the Engineers not to cost optimize all of the little stuff and stay with the better than spec totl parts they used to prove their designs, and if there was something in the expensive parts, talk to me first before optimizing it. We maintained insane margins, had near zero failures, and had lots of fan-boy customers.
Products that are not built to meet the requirements of customers which includes price, are almost invariably turds.....the trick is to pick the right customers to design and build for.
