What 50k$+ buys you...

[luvdunhill]

And lowly Hammonds at that.

you say that.. I was looking at some of the Hammond pricing and you can drop big bucks on them... $500 and up easily per transformer.

[Sherwood]

Versus, say, the Kondo's Tangos, which are then wound in silver.

[n_maher]

you say that.. I was looking at some of the Hammond pricing and you can drop big bucks on them... $500 and up easily per transformer.

Sure you can, but in this case we have:

2x 159ZG (15MH/4A choke) = $27.89/ea from Digikey

2x 157L (14H/75MA choke) = $26.16/ea from Digikey

That's all I spot so far, I'm guessing the big iron is on the top side of the PS.

[Dreadhead]

$500 a transformer while a lot is a drop in the bucket. Remember this unit is over $100,000.

[luvdunhill]

Lamm is epic fail. even worse is their phono stage.

[spritzer]

While Lamm is pure and utter crap they are just one offender on an ever growing list. I do wonder if a company with the mentality of Quad in the old days would survive today with sane prices instead of this absurd crap.

[Duggeh]

While Lamm is pure and utter crap they are just one offender on an ever growing list. I do wonder if a company with the mentality of Quad in the old days would survive today with sane prices instead of this absurd crap.

Sugden might be the closest thing.

[spritzer]

That's what I think as well. We can see this here in the headphone community where price is the ultimate benchmark and most of the MOT's are imbeciles.

Sugden might be the closest thing.

The UK does have a few brands left and Sugden is amongst them.

[Grahame]

I mourn the death of evidence based reasoning in hi-fi.

When Hi-Fi meant Hi-Fidelity, Highly Faithful - the closest approach to the original sound. When new technology or design approaches improved the measured performance of equipment.

Instead, today, Hi-Fi seems to mean High Finance, as marketeers engage in expectation bias as the ultimate placebo, and owners engage in a micturating contest as how much they can spend, in the pursuit of "perceived" improvement.

When commoditization of hardware and economies of scale in component production is seen as a bad thing.

It is almost as if the democratization of audio quality is seen as a bad thing.

After all, how can you feel special, if it is within the reach of everyman.

[Sherwood]

The pissing contest is the problem.

Have you ever read an honest, thoughtful review that concluded "I could not hear a difference"? I've never written one. How could I? I kept listening until the difference was there.

Stereophile, a rag if ever there was one, actually enforces "difference hearing" as an editorial strategy. No less, they credit their success directly to it, along with describing how something sounds in addition to how it measures. Moreover, they have to constantly defend the decision to measure equipment at all. The measurements are the only thing that hold true between the reviewer's system and the end user's, but they're abstract and thus useless.

You should have seen some of the rooms at RMAF two weeks ago. The best room of the entire show, bar none, was Ray Kimber's soundlab panels through pro EMM Labs gear powered by Pass 350 stereo amps. That whole setup would run around $100,000 for the pair. A titanic sum to any reasonable individual, no doubt, but it represented a concept. The concept was "this is the outer limit of the possible, using the best equipment that can be purchased".

Meanwhile there were guys selling gilded 300b boxes for about that much.

That kind of shit does nothing for the hobby. The people who buy those aren't contributing to better sound reproduction in any way. They're allowing con men to steal their money for shiny boxes.

[spritzer]

There has always been expensive hi-fi equipment (old JBL speakers, Marantz amps etc.) but they were expensive to make so that was reflected in the price. Now it's just a matter of shiny boxes with no engineering merit what so ever to see how much the idiots are willing to pay.

[pabbi1]

silver transformers is nothing compared to custom silver foil inductors.. pricing is crazy on both. Electra Print offers a nice partial silver stranded secondary (PSSS) transformer option here:

Electra-Print.com Partial Silver Stranded Secondary Transformers

.. not that I've been considering it or anything

Group buy - heck, I was willing to drop $2k on Lundahl iron on the Raven-like project... more about all that in Houston.