It’s not much of a secret that in the world of ‘audiophile gear’ there is a lot of snake oil and deception, including many products that are at best of questionable value. The Tom Evans Mastergroove SR mkIII preamplifier is one example of this, as [Mark] from the Mend it Mark YouTube channel found in a recent video when he got one to repair which the manufacturer claimed ‘could not be fixed’. This marvel of audio engineering provides amplification for record players, for the low-low price of only twenty-five thousand quid, or about 29.000 US bucks. So what’s inside one of these expensive marvels?
Claiming to be a high-end unit, with only ten units produced per year, you’d expect a gold-plated PCB with excellent noise isolation. The unit does come with an absolutely massive external power supply that dwarfs the preamplifier itself, but the real surprise came after opening up the unit itself to take a peek at the damage, some of which was caused by transport.
As it turns out, the inside of the preamplifier consists out of four stacks of rather cheap, home-made looking boards with what looks like improvised RF shielding in the form of bare PCBs and filed-off markings on many parts. In between the rat’s nest of wiring running everywhere, [Mark] had to trace the broken channel’s wiring, creating a full repair manual in the process. Along the way one of the opamp boards was found to be defective, courtesy of a single shorted tantalum capacitor.
With the tantalum capacitor replaced, [Mark] had repaired the unit, but even though the preamplifier isn’t terribly designed, the illusion of its price tag has been shattered worse than the contents of a parcel kicked across the parking lot by the Royal Mail.
Thanks to [Jim] for the tip.
My favorite audio snakeoil is this £1,662.50 “audiophile grade” ethernet cable:
https://www.audiosanctuary.co.uk/vertere-pulse-data-ethernet-cable.html
They also sell similarly priced USB cables.
Yeah, I’m sure my packets arrive with better tone using these cables….
Brad
Hackaday sounds better since I use those cables.
Don’t forget the coveted Gold Plated TOSLINK/Fiber audio cables ;)
Mine is “golden glass fuse” with a description going like:
It’s made of gold and gold as we know does not inverse phase.
I also remember a guy who was selling expensive audiophile cables which finally appeared to be regular cables stuffed inside garden hose. Drama was big which is strange because some manufacturers openly admit that their audiophile cables are their standard line just more expensive. Not even garden hose included.
…today it’s a lot stranger, since copper has become so expensive.
As lots of old cheap cables were pure copper the newer cheap cables often are aluminum or -really, not joking- if they come straight from aliexpress even IRON…. yes really iron…
so at least these days you have to take care to get at least pure copper… with or without garden hose :-))
Luckily you get free shipping on that cable, otherwise it would not fit in my budget.
Also the toslink (optical) shielded with gold plated end.
And to think some gullible fool will probably buy this 🤣🤣🤣
@ Pazalaza, I bought two of those toslink gold plated cables from the supersite amazwrong and I am struggling to figure how they gold plated the plastic cable ends :( They did only cost 14 USD for the the pair.
Just like those plastic shower heads that are metal plated and sold for hundreds of $ by brands like Moen, Kohler, etc. I find it incredible how much engineering is going into making crap product appear more expensive to basically cheat the consumer. These plastic parts have a really thin metal coating on the outside to make it appear as if it is metal or otherwise more premium than it really is.
One vendor who years ago sold expensive exotic, esoteric, hand made “audio transmission line” cables gave advice recently about wiring high end audio into new construction and he said to “just use Romex”. I guess he no longe sells “audio transmission lines” to pair with expensive acoustic transmission line speakers.
Back in the 70s during the amplifier anti-distortion wars, one of the US audio magazines did a blind test of “golden ears” listeners using a modified high end amp where knobs could be used to set harmonic and intermodulation (IM) distortion levels. The point at which the distortion was detected by the test listeners ended up being orders of magnitude above the levels found in amps of that time.
On a different but similar topic, check out the story of “golden tongue” wine tasters:
Adam Ruins Everything – Why Wine Snobs Are Faking It
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PeKcWCC-tw
Back in the day I worked for a company producing such items.
From cables to amps, preamp, dacs, etc.
Its was snake oil.. But.. There was some science behind it.
They even had their own pcb population lab that I was in charge of, from stencilling silver solder paste to populating with their own surface mount robot and finally using nitrogen in the reflow oven.
It might have been over priced, but it was genuinely thought through to get the slightest improvement.
Bare in mind how much a pick and place robot would have cost in the late 80s.
I always remember the reviewers.. Very strange guys.. But had rooms filled with such expensive kit it was unreal.
You always spend percentages of your money on things you like.. These people cater to such whims..
Speaking of cables, I’ll leave this evergreen here:
https://www.engadget.com/2008-03-03-audiophiles-cant-tell-the-difference-between-monster-cable-and.html
so I was watching the youtube video and it was removed by none other than Tom Evans! I say everyone do everything you can to mess this guy up. His crap is just crap. Cheap handmade bs. I can’t believe the really lousy way these things are built.
Interestingly the manufacturer TOM EVANS who sent the amp to Mark for repair has now sued him for copyright. Not sure what Mark copied as all he did was repair the amp. Anyway, seems TOM EVANS has dug himself even a deeper hole…
$30,000 for an amp? No I wouldn’t expect gold plated PCBs inside, I’d expect a chorus of angels and a full pixie orchestra!
A pre-amp, which means that it needs a suitable power amp after it to drive loudspeakers and make sound. A matching amp may cost, let’s say, 50,000…!
Oh, well that’s different, for $50,000 I’d expect a personal visit from the Holy Trinity, Xenu and the Flying Spaghetti Monster!
And one made from plastic and cheapest almost home made boards and components by the looks of it. Build quality was so bad, I was dying from shame watching the repair video and I didn’t even build the darn thing. I mean the general topology of the device actually did sound legit, but build quality is dumpster level, engineering student/test build at best. RF shielding is such a joke in it too. They could very well be that and dude is trying to peddle them off. No idea who would buy such an expensive product from a totally unknown vendor.
When I am crowned world emperor there will be unpleasant consequences for any manufacturer that sands the part numbers off their semiconductors.
It always makes a repair take 20x longer than it should just because some long-lost tiny volume manufacturer is convinced that someone is plotting to steal their precious boutique design that has about 10 customers.
I dont think its about their boutique design being stolen,
Its about keeping those 10 customers buying $29K pieces of equipment every few years. The sort of people who can throw away that kind of money are seeking brand prestige. Someones got to cater to their silly desires and it beats trying to move 1000 units at $290 a piece.
Sorry, pressed ‘report comment’ but I meant to press reply.
Not only that, the vast majority of those designs are cookie cutter whitepaper designs.
Nothing special, no creativity, just a standard implementation.
I found an audiophile site once where everyone was buying expensive boards from some dude who’d managed to make himself the guru of their little corner of the internet, and they were all Radio Shack kit grade stuff with a single standard integrated amplifier chip and something like a hobby LM317 circuit as the power supply. They were all raving about the quality of course.
Credit where credit is due: if someone were to make amps out of hand-selected good components and measures the output to conform to some known frequency/phase response curve and THD levels, then it doesn’t matter that it’s a standard kit or a white paper reference design. In fact you might want it to be exactly that – a known reference design that you know will work for you.
What you’re paying for is the knowledge that it isn’t some knock-off made with random parts that performs better or worse depending on the day of the week it was made.
Try buying a cheap amp and then sending it off to a calibration shop to get it measured for performance. See how much that costs – and then if it doesn’t turn out to be what you wanted, do you buy another amp and repeat until you find one that does?
THD levels?!? You’re just dropping acronyms which you obviously know nothing about. Harmonic distortion (the ‘H’) is natural/musical distortion which the human ear can’t even distinguish between 0.05% vs. 1% (or even much more).
In fact an acoustic guitar has a THD component that is significantly more than most audio equipment manufacturer’s THD specs, which equates to pointless propaganda designed to impress fools.
In response to Steve – yes, THD as a single percent spec can be meaningless, but the level and order of distortion generated by an amplifier can absolutely have an audible effect, especially at higher output powers.
Large amounts of even-order harmonics, for example, are largely responsible for the “warm tube sound” that some folks gush over.
Yes – harmonics are naturally created by, say, an acoustic guitar; These harmonics are responsible for the “guitar sound” vs a pure sine wave of the note’s fundamental frequency.
Similarly, a shit-tonne of distortion in an amplifier can alter the character of the sound.
One would expect that a multi-kilobuck amplifier would simply produce a higher-power version of what’s put into it, and not add additional distortion.
Though to your original point, no, nobody can tell the difference between 0.5% and 1% THD. Well, maybe there’s some expert listener out there with perfect hearing and some magical abilities – but it sure as hell isn’t me 🤣
Except when the harmonics shift the sound energy from the bass frequencies up to the mid-range, because the human ear is more sensitive there. If you follow the equal loudness curves, you need a lot more sound pressure at 50 Hz than at 500 Hz to be equally loud. So, if you’re playing loud low frequency sounds, and 1% of that sound energy turns up at the higher frequency range as harmonic distortions, it can be very clearly noticeable. Having twice as much, or half as much distortion, is also clearly noticeable.
Harmonic distortion in the middle frequencies are not that important, because those harmonics appear at even higher frequencies where the ear becomes less sensitive again, and most people are nearly deaf above 15 kHz anyways.
I’ve seen such LM317 circuits in professional piezoelectric sensor charge amplifier circuits, that come with calibration certificates and tight performance specs up to ultrasound frequencies. It’s not a bad part, and surprisingly crude circuitry can perform well when implemented correctly.
Nah, filed off part numbers, especialy on something like an op-amp just means you can use whatever the hell you like to repair it.
Just remember to file the part number of those repolacement audiophool LM358s and sprinkle the invoice with BS about immersion in “gaseous phase nitrogen (79%)”, “burning in with a sound stage widening audio profile” etc. to justify the repair price, parts cost and to make the owner feel they’ve had value for money
“..gaseous phase nitrogen (79%)..” LOL! Almost ejected my morning coffee via paired nasal orifices.
Sometimes competitors do try to copy good designs and steal the results of extremely expensive and talented development work. I would not criticise some obfuscation aimed at slowing down this theft of intellectual property.
On the other hand snake oil scam products never give a list of ingredients.
just because there’s a properly-perceived profit incentive to shaft the customer doesn’t mean i will not crititcize shafting the customer
Nobody is going to buy a 25 grand amplifier to make a clone and undercut the original that’s probably only selling a couple each year.
I can confidently say that for half the price I’d design you a mc preamp from scratch with stellar specs, that looks gorgeous on the outside AND inside, and still make an outrageous profit, even if I only sell one, even if I’m using goddamn metal standoffs and gold on gold interconnects everywhere. And I certainly don’t consider myself a top of the class engineer, far from it. If I was one of those, I’d be able to do exactly that but with an affordable selling price.
There is nothing special in hand-selecting parts, paralleling semi-conductors for lower noise amplification and using brute force for low-noise power. These are techniques that have been used for decades and true, they are costly, but not 25 grand costly.
“four stacks of rather cheap, home-made looking boards”
What the heck is wrong with you? The inside of the amp is beautiful.
I’m open to hearing how “filed-off markings” do anything to RF interference.
What the heck is wrong with you? You’re saying scraping off paint mitigates RF interference? Something that’s not there is a solution to a problem? Huh what?
Incorrect.
Hi Tom!
I think Maya is saying that while these boards aren’t necessarily poorly designed (“but even though the preamplifier isn’t terribly designed…”), there’s nothing here which justifies a £25k price tag.
A consequence of allowing some people get too rich. Tax them hard.
You may possess the truth, but what about the marbles?
Lost those what few there were ages ago it seems.
Audiophile snake oil is fun because like errors there are two types of snake oil. Type 1 snake oil is just junk, things like $1000 Ethernet cables or giant isolation transformers that end up introducing more noise than they remove.
But there is also what I call type 2 snake oil, which is really clever well designed circuits that solve problems that no one has. Past a certain point, which granted is different for everybody, the improvements you make to gear stop mattering. The sound is traveling through the jello of you ear into the bone and nerve of you skull and brain. No one can tell that you squeezed another 3 dB out of the noise floor when you were already at -97 dB. Some of the best analog engineers in the world, who make extremely low noise, sensitive test equipment for places Keysight, Lecroy, or Tek could speed a decade designing the best DAC amp combo and it might preform marginally better than one that cost 300 dollars in double blind testing.
Sorry about the rant but I have seen some obviously amazing engineering talent be wasted on this stuff.
I am SOOOOO sad that Mark did not open the power supply. I mean a so huge tank for a few Milliampere? I am guessing the fairy from Silmarillion are working inside on a small bycicles and that explains why they can only made 10 of them each year! New fairy baby are seldom!
But it is also a good sign of the mental health of the UK that it is only possible to sell 10 each year. :-D
Olaf
It probably is there solely for weight. Feels sturdy which means audio quality must be significantly better.
I’ve seen some plain steel weights inside Logitech Bluetooth receivers for the same purpose. Remove the steel weights and the air flow around will disturb the BT& amp circuitry severely.
I can beat that – I’ve seen audiophiles selling extra heavy volume knobs with a load of BS about how they improve the sound. They come in a little case like jewellery of course.
But the knob goes to 11…
I had, 45 years ago, an “entry level” or “budget” amplifier that was the bottom of the JVC range. The volume knob on that thing weighed a couple of ounces. Wish I’d kept that knob.
Exactly. Last year, some representative from the consumer protection authority here in Ireland said that if your phone charger feels like throw it out if it’s heavy it’s good. If ‘expert advice’ is saying heavy means quality the general public will follow suit. And if I’m not mistaken I saw a tear down not long after that of a power supply that literally contained scrap metal with no other purpose than to add “heft”.
Back when the phone company owned all telephones and we just leased them, the reason those handsets had such a solid feel compared to the seemingly chickenshit consumer stuff that eventually became available is that they had a big lead weight running the length of the handset from the mic to the speaker.
This may have served an actual function, the handset has to press down the pickup reliably, you don’t want it to to be “off-hook” accidentally. It may also be slightly off-center, as the speaker is typically more heavyweight than the microphone.
Ditto, bought a 5.1 headset with its own preamp many a years back, it also contained a chunk of rusty iron. After the iron chunk came loose and i had to remove it, it never regained the audiophonic excellence it had before. Must have been the absense of the magnetic field polarization enabling the electrons to spin randomly while the 5.1 to headphone mixing was taking place.
Then there are those lightweight charging bases for cordless phones. The steel coupons did have a purpose of keeping lightweight doo-dads somewhat anchored.
yeah, another gripe. All of the stiff as a ……… …. wires on everything now.
The cords are stiff enough to flip and drag the bases off a table top.
Real hoot when the base is plugged in behind a large piece of furniture that’s blocking the retrieval. The fragile lamps, and jewellery racks on top of said furnishings are just bonus points!
Later in the video he shows the schematic for the power supply (in the service manual he created), so he did open it up. It’s a bog-standard linear power supply from the looks of it.
There has been lots of work done on better (low noise and output impedance) regulators done over the years. With a series of articles in Audio Amateur. I upgraded my Carver C1 preamp with these Didden/Jung regulators. I checked the MC stage (inputs shorted since I have never owned a MC cart) and even with the volume knob at maximum, I heard nothing. Was it the fancy regulator or the opamp PSRR?
The C1 uses vanilla opamps (OK, I replaced a couple with OPA2132) on one single layer PCB. A heck of a lot easier to work on than this nightmare.
Considering the noise level of a vinyl’s “silent” groove, there’s really no point to a super-low-noise preamp; it just needs to be about 10 dB below the groove noise to be completely masked. Nobody sits around listening to preamp hiss when there’s no music playing. I wish he had checked for distortion and RIAA eq. accuracy using a test record for a source (this is REALLY difficult). My suspicion is that they’re nothing to write home about.
Here you enter a can of worms. If you use a test record, then you have to assume that the test record is correct. Also, both moving magnet and moving coil cartridges have an intrinsic inductance that forms a resonant circuit with the capacitance from the connecting cable and the preamplifier input. I’ve read that some preamps have adjustable input capacitance to optimize the resonance.
There’s value to getting the measurements using a test record; it shows how the system works. To evaluate how accurate the preamp is, it’s better to use a signal generator.
I have listened to preamp hiss, then listened to the additional noise from the groove when nothing was being recorded, then listened to the even greater noise added from the tape source used to cut the record. It’s just what some curious people do. Also, listening to preamp hiss is what some people do when they’re too lazy to do anything when a record finishes playing.
I don’t recall him describing the function of those DIP switches.
Tone arms used to use a “driven shield” to eliminate the wiring capacitance. The signal is buffered at the receiving end and drives the cable shield which is NOT grounded at the cartridge end. This way there is almost no difference between the shield and the signal, therefore, almost no capacitance. The low impedance signal on the shield still makes it a shield with the driver feedback compensating for any noise impinging on it. (There is probably a better way of explaining it).
This reminds of another stupidly expensive unit, the Linn Sondek 12. I pity the fools who paid top $ for it!!
There’s a lot of ways to improve the sound of a turntable, one of the most cost effective and best is to throw it in the bin along with your vinyl and buy a decent digital transport.
I would argue it isn’t just the sound quality, it’s just how vinyl sounds. I personally rather enjoy the imperfections as well as the process of using it. As such it’s a combined experience and you give your music more attention, so it’s perceived as better and more enjoyable. It just isn’t the same as other listening but to each their own, if someone likes it and it makes them happy, then what’s the problem?
No problem at all, that’s why my amplifier has a tone control, so I can adjust the sound to how I like it, it’s hardly HiFi though is it…
And if you ‘enjoy the imperfections’ of the playback media which is different for every single physical copy and playback environment then that really doesn’t fit the definition of HiFi either does it…
….i mean the Sondek CD12…..marketed at £30000…..
I see two dozen power tranys in what must be a p-p output pair? I’ve seen 2 power pair in higher end pre part of integrated amps but this? A phono preamp is basically a low noise op amp pair, to drive a pot going to a power amp. The low impedance doesn’t make sense. Class A ultra linear with real tube warmth in more ways than one. Snakes need warmth to be active.
All those tantalizingly (pun) failure prone colorful caps everywhere! When they fail they short and release colorful smoke when on power rails. Kinda un-fixable unless you recap all the yellow ones. They lose to ‘lytics in the long run. Good ones, Nichicon vs. Teapo.
You nailed that pun! +50 bonus points for you. XD
12/10 on pun
“power tranys”? That’s as precious as internet musicians who call pickups “pups”. These attempts to conserve precious letter resources are abhorrent. Also the Instant Coffee Question (Quon to such folks) comes into play: What do you do with the time you save?
Nice work. A company that sells such expensive gear and can’t fix is not credible. Never mind if I hear additional K£ or not.
Those extreme cases of audio voodoo are funny but no one laughs when people are buying 6″smartphones with 4K screen because fullHD was not detailed enough for them meanwhile having 15″ laptops with lower resolution:)
Yeah! The new audiophile!
I’m sure there is a word to describe people that join lines outside apple stores to buy the latest piece of “tech”, and then race home to put up an ‘unboxing’ video on youtube. Just can’t think of it. Maybe id10t?
Considering their clientel, one can assume the manufacturer wishes for another crossing of their palm with silver.
What a rip off .
The real scandal here isn’t so much the shonky build quality but a so called premium hifi manufacturer not being prepared to repair the item.
Anyone paying 25k for this thing has more money than sense
Agreed. If you were willing to pay for this, fine, regardless of whether this is justified this is your own decision of spending (wasting?) your hard earned cash. However, you’d expect that this would last, and if it doesn’t, that at the very least it’s repairable, if not for free (i.e. lifetime guarantee). Paying this much and getting this level of customer service is shocking.
Try spending $75K on an industrial 3d printer, being required to pay $15k a year for a maintenance plan that only qualifies you to have them service your machine, but doesnt actually pay for any repairs it needs.
Every time you contact the company for support after the first few years they try to convince you to take $15k tradein value on a NEW $75K printer.
10 years in when youve shelled out twice your purchase price and are almost a quarter of a million dollars into it they cut off support entirely.
Then a few years later to add insult to injury, They start building their newest models with a different material delivery system and stop supplying materials that will fit in your rfid locked system.
Not being allowed to have 3rd party repairs done. Not being able to buy parts to self repair. Not even being able to buy material.
So unless you pony up another $75K and start all over youre stuck buying old machines off ebay for parts and reusing your old cartridges by refilling them manually with materials from their newer gen printers.
There is merit in not being the first to jump on a new bandwagon.
Not really.
The print quality of their machines hasnt changed significantly over the years
The new machines cost about the same as the old machines.
The company still requires the same maintenance fees of the new machines.
20 years later there is ONE printer made in china with similar capabilities, which does cost roughly half the price.
10 years after the first purchase, I picked up a broken 2 year old second gen machine from a liquidation auction, repaired it and put it into service. Those machines were similarly EOSL dumped around their 7 year mark. Their material system was the same, their existence is what extended my first machines material availability. When their EOSL date came their userbase lost not only maintenance support but also material availability.
Im not printing knick knacks and bric a brac for shits and giggles.
Ive had two decades of beds full of crowns bridges and frameworks coming out of my dental lab, with a dragons horde of jewelry filling the vacant zones of my printbeds.
Its not that I CANT afford a new printer,
Its that I shouldnt have to since mine all produce as well today as the day they were bought, NO THANKS to the company that made them.
I bought a german sportscar in 1984. I took good care of it and it lost value but not functionality year after year. By 2000 it was valued less than 1/2 what Id paid for it. I still took good care of it. As of this year its book value is 1.25X what I paid for it, but its not uncommon to see them sell for 2X+.
It still runs and drives as good as when I bought it. Just like my 3d printers. Only I can order most any part I need, and could take it to any number of mechanics if I werent inclined to wrench myself. And I can still get gas and oil for it. Unlike my 3d printers.
there is no way that amp isn’t some elaborate money laundering scheme
I know someone who designs and builds amps. Quality HiFi products. He tests every single component. He throws away about 75% of the resistors, capacitors etc, even when starting out with the more expensive brands, just because they don’t meet the specifications needed and all components need to be the highest quality to lower the distortion of the sound. His designs are super high quality and you can actually measure the difference.
There are a ton of ways to create amplifiers and even phono amps such as the one here, can be made in a variety of ways. Now I don’t know the one in the article, but there are many options to choose from. Do you want MM or MC capabilities, how do you deal with RIAA curves? Solid State? Tubes? All have different advantages and drawbacks and designing the “right” one can be very tricky. A properly tuned one takes a long time to design and if it’s handmade in low numbers, the prices go up up up as the costs per unit skyrocket. The person I know sells them for about 2000 euro’s and barely makes money on them. If he would actually charge himself a reasonable hourly wage, he’d loose money on it. He does it because he likes it.
does he also rub it in unicorn fat in moonlight at noon? what a load of bollocks
I don’t know if that’s a fair comment. Some of it sounds legit. As in Ive tried many times to create a product and found no matter what I couldn’t do it economically enough to make any money but continued to do it for friends or colleagues. But I certainly didn’t throw away 75% of my passive components because that’s outrageous unless I was getting them from some terribly supplier on eBay or AliExpress or whatever but if I wanted quality to sell quality I’d go to a reputable supplier.
“He throws away about 75% of the resistors… just because they don’t meet the specifications needed”
You can (readily) purchase SMD resistors with 0.01% tolerance for a few pennies each, and your guy is tossing 75% of them because they don’t meet spec? You’re either prone to insanely irrational hyperbole or your guy is a moron who couldn’t design a cardboard box to save his life… I’ll let you decide.
What fool would throw away components that dont fulfill ones criterias ? Resell the rejects, one mans trash is another mans treasure. Then again, if one doesnt care about money in any way, i can see why binning the rejects would simplify things.
I know nothing about the company selling these things but…. to be devil’s advocate.
.
Let’s say it’s one guy who is the entire company who isn’t trying maliciously fleece people but maybe is trying to… have a job and a profit in the black ink and pay rent. Who- even if he lifted the entire circuit and design still had to shop out some PCBs, source the components then physically build these things and assemble it all and (not in this case haha) end up with a physical product. Then market and sell them. 25k£ per copy is 250k£ per year for one guy. If it was two or more people this would never exist you couldn’t do that job I don’t think. Just the labor to make them isn’t going to be cheap in the UK or anywhere using fair labor pay.
.
If they sold for their actual value, or even 1/10th of MSRP these wouldn’t exist at all. There must exist an economic term for this but that they exist at all is because they are insane expensive. You probably couldn’t make 100 of those at 100x the labor cost and sell them for 1/10th the price let alone 1000 of them at a “reasonable” 250£
It’s not a viable business. Say the guy falls sick for a month or two, or has to replace a bunch of devices because he doesn’t have the troubleshooting skills to repair them? There’s also the implicit assumption in your post that these devices actually do anything special and that there is a need for them to exist.
Literally said in first sentence I’m playing devil’s advocate.
Never said it was or should be a viable business. I said if it wasn’t crazy expensive it wouldn’t be in existence at all.
I am also confused about my “implicit assumption” and sorry for your misinterpretation. I actually “implied” that he lifted the circuit design whole
cloth so how you got to “does anything special” is likewise mystifying. I’ll try better next time to explain.
Cheers.
You just give him a shit ton of leeway. If i made and sold cookies and named them like HealthyCureAll-cookies and sold them at stupid high prices, you wouldn’t be mad when your grandma wasted couple months of pension on them and it was found out they are just normal sugar cookies? I mean i gotta make a living don’t i?
There is a major difference between claiming health benefits and audio benefits.
Ok, if i made and sold an electric car …
That is literally the basis of every single health supplement on the market in the US. the only single controlled trial to ever show an effect of any supplement ever was, I believe vitamin E (or maybe it was A) and it increased mortality. And as a health care person I definitely get pissed about it but I shout at the tide about a lot of health care stuff but the darn tide keeps coming in anyway. One personal example- breast feeding cookies. 4x the price. Same or probably worse than Oreos or whatever.
The golden child as the most discredited health supplements in history with tests over decade on hundreds of thousand human beings and shown to have NO effect…
Vitamin C
yeah but if that guy existed in that form then he’d be eager to repair it to keep his ten customers happy
The fact that the manufacturer claims they couldn’t be fixed, suggests that the designer isn’t actually very good at electronics.
More likely the electronics are assembled somewhere in china and then shipped, filed and assembled into the casing wherever this genius recides.
Or he just knew the mechanics of building something but just copied and pasted the design from the decades of examples. Like a tech without any real theory.
I wouldn’t spend stupid money on things like that. The most I’ve spent on cabling is 4m of Van Damme Locap55 instrument cable and suitable plugs, cost £43 to make a 2 meter interconnect with comparable performance to a branded £200 pre made cable. Oh, and just over £60 in parts to build a silver plated power lead for my amp which really made a difference
“Oh, and just over £60 in parts to build a silver plated power lead for my amp which really made a difference”
Uh huh. I have to go stand somewhere else now…
Took me about 30 seconds on this company’s web page to deduce this equipment is in no way designed to be amazing and primary goal is to separate people from money. They aren’t even trying. Examples- the FAQ has two entries total one of which is sell your crap amplifier and buy mine.
Another gem “We’re hard at work in here….. Honest.”
Anyone that plunks down $25 large without so much as a warranty sort of gets what they deserve.
I mean it’s kinda hard to feel bad for rich suckers but… wait nope. End of sentence.
I’m not going to comment on the price of this pre-amp, but I will say that it does not have to look good inside to work well. I am (was) a EE and dabbled in building amps. My amps looked worse but worked pretty well – that’s the nature of hand-made. Of course, they were just hobby amps only for me. As a commercial product, this should held to a higher standard; however, when you look at the schematics you can see that there is some solid design there. Anyway, my 2 cents…
I did like the interior look of some H. H. Scott amplifiers I worked on!
There’s an audio equipment “designer” I see on youtube once in a while who reuses old stereo gear enclosures, installs new circuits (I don’t know if she designs them) then goops everything up with silicone. She makes huge capacitor banks for all her stuff, then splatters paint all over the box, and goops the knobs and switches up with silicone, and calls it “art”. The wiring is interesting- no bent wires- only straight or gentle curves because bends cause stress in the wire and that will be audible in the music.
Thank you for this little gem of information. Just triggered my migraine.
My goodness, how can I find that channel? Yes, I do want the pain :).
That reminds me of an early wannabe audiophile kid I knew that was convinced that the more capacitors in his power amplifier’s supply, the more bass power he would get. He bought an expensive amp, added his caps, and blew up the power transformer when he turned it on. I don’t know why the fuse didn’t blow. He probably increased it’s ratings to get more power or just kept replacing it.
I am sure you could have sold him gold plated knobs to improve crispness or something.
I tried to warn him.
The price is very high, but not outrageously high by Audiophile standards. There is a lot of material content in this item and it is a very low volume, hand-built unit with (apparently) manually matched components. The circuit design is very elaborate (probably unnecessary so) and does incorporate some worthwhile design features including cartridge capacitance and resistance matching, adjustable gain etc. elaborate power regulation is very important for small signal stuff, albeit that this seems like
Even the labour costs of manual assembly and component testing would be very material. The parts content on the circuit boards looks as though it would add up to a couple of hundred quid and the perspex case isn’t cheap. Then you have to factor in taxes, property costs, insurance, salaries and allow for a decent profit margin and the design and testing costs. Essentially this is a series produced prototype with no manufacturing cost optimisations, so it’s not surprising that it is very pricey.
Is it cost effective? No. Does it perform well? Yes (probably). It looks like a passion product made for and bought by committed enthusiasts. They are prepared to pay for what sounds good to them.
Looks like Tom Evans put a bogus copyright claim on the video because he didn’t appreciate the world seeing what his amp looks like on this inside? That’s a pretty scummy move, shame on him.
Agreed, Tom doesn’t come out well from actions like that.
Sounds like this Tom Evans character is a bit of a slimeball. Only a jerk retaliates against someone who is just trying to help others. There wasn’t even a copyright violation so on top of that he lied about it.
The video got a copyright strike..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPIrCaeVtvI
We need take action against this censorship. Does anyone have a copy of a copy of the original video?
Looks like someone’s got us covered: https://archive.org/details/the-gbp-25-000-pre-amp-that-went-wrong-tom-evans-mastergroove-sr-mk-iii-rjbp-fsfzi-i
I understand why most people here feel that the amplifier is snakeoil. It probably has been designed decently, but using reference designs from BB or AD or TI. The result will be pretty decent and probably as good as it needs to be (it’s not a reference or calibration instrument but something listened to by human ears).
Yes there are probably lots of made up phrases that sound technical to convince people that they are getting top quality……..that happens in lots of industries. However good quality design often comes down to locating the right components in the right places to minimise noise etc. the result won’t look any better than poor design unless you also put a lot of time into improving the mechanical design which doesn’t improve sound but makes the product look much better and more expensive.
The probable aim of the company is to produce “exclusive” products which means scarce and expensive. It’s more about the buyer being able to show off their wealth than having the best technical product.
In a way it’s like buying a Banksy. Is a Banksy cheap to make? Is it the best technically? Or does it provide the owner with a famous and exclusive product (ok a Banksy is not the best product to chose but the prints of a Banksy are…….look at the prices for a limited edition print!).
So for me this product is as much about “art” and exclusivity. In which case the price is not based on cost but on perceived value. Would I buy one? Certainly not. I’d also not buy a Banksy print either (unless I was guaranteed to be able to sell it for a significant increase in price).
Btw I am not suggesting that this product is good value and yes I agree that it is a waste of money at the price but that applies for a lot of products that people perceive as “luxury”.
Mark posted a follow-up video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPIrCaeVtvI