Yeah, that's..... rather ridiculous. It's bad enough when NEW electrolytic caps have that initial leak at turn on, requiring a few moments to charge and settle, but 3 days?! And they want it left on all the time for best performance? I know nothing of how these are designed, but the electrolytic caps alone would be well past the common 2000k~ hour life expectancy in a few months. Looked at their site and here's a pretty empty gut shot:
I'm kinda surprised to see so many WIMA film caps in there. The metal electrolytic ones appear computer-grade. Definitely NOT $9500 worth of parts
. The next step up is $28k? Suppose there's one born every minute and they'll justify every cent regardless if they actually like the sound, and probably don't realize they can improve what they already have to sound as good or better (having extremely low noise when no audio is present can be fixed with better parts). Even if I had 20 million in the bank and buying something like was the same as an everyday person buying a $9.50 used 30 year old pre-amp, I'd still choose the vintage gear and just upgrade everything with polystyrene or polypropylene, (especially ceramic and polyester in the audio signal- yuck) and even do the resistors for the ultimate improvement if it needed the final nudge, and in a blind test would bet money it sounded better being under a grand fully restored with parts custom selected to my liking.
I technically use my custom built PC as a pre-amp/audio'movie center. It's running a MSI 990FXA-GD80 V2 board and comes with a really
nice sound card and can do digital or spdif out @192kHz 24bit and already has high-end components incorporated into the board for a tiny fraction of what this costs. THD in non existent and the weakest link boils down to the actual amp used.
It's funny, as I'm not really one for latching onto quotes of others as to me it implies one can't creatively create their own unique thoughts or analogies, or fearful a "new" quote won't have the impact someone on a pedestal might have, but a guy I worked for decades ago that was well-off due to his father's used car lots, once made the simple but powerful statement to me "It's not how much you earn, it's how much you save that matters", which interestingly applies to every working class individual from a janitor to a CEO (though it's obviously easier to save more, faster with a 6 digit income vs. 5 digit), more so nowadays as the Great Depression era of saving everything is relatively lost on 3rd, 4th, 5th, generations since that time period as quite often the more one makes now, the more they spend, and while they might technically make $40k a month, expenses are quite often more than that or very close to it due to poor budgeting, overindulgence's, etc. technically making them broke. That's always stuck with me though and rings true here, while being applied under a different context. You can spend a lot for something that does very little, or save your funds and apply less of them to get much, much more from vintage or kits.
I digress. I counted 20 WIMA film caps there, and around 18 computer-grade caps (pretty sure that's what they are), and I won't include what I can't see, but WIMA are roughly $3 each at partsconexxion for the end-user in an online retail environment so you know they are cheaper in bulk or say the 20% sale PC always runs, but for the sake of this argument I'll say $3 x 20 = $60. Let's say the small caps are uber expensive at $8 each so $8 x 18 = $144. The little black rectangles might be another type of polypropylene cap which I'll guess at 15 total and knowing they won't need insane voltages as the WIMA aren't, means they might be a little cheaper, but let's say those are too are $8 each so $8 x 15 = so another $120. Add .$0.50 per ribbon wire $0.50 x 2 = $1. Maybe $5 for the PCB as copper plating is more expensive nowadays, Say $75 for all pots/buttons, another $100 for case, and a generous $200 extra for what's not shown including IC, tiny toroidals, terminals, etc. So $60+ $144 +$120 +$1 +$5 +$75 +$100 + $100 = $705. So figure in a kit-form at the DIY level paying retail prices buy everything from scratch, you might be looking at $700 here at most,or about the same price as a decent tube pre-amp, but to puff the ego you drop $9500? Amazing.
