The Smyth brothers are not accepting orders now, not even reservations or a wait list. I hounded them for 15 minutes to no avail.
This technology goes beyond mere audio delight: you can store each of your profiles on an SD card, and swap them in to someone else's SVS unit (your profiles and those of your regular listening companions for your reference speaker system(s) or concert hall(s) -- whatever they may be, as long as you can get measured listening to them -- will be stored on your home unit as well as on your SD cards).
So imagine that a network of measurment rooms has been set up. Famous recording studios, famous concert halls, with high end speakers or even LIVE source. After all, if your ears hear it, those tiny mikes record it, and then the math kicks in, reproducing almost exactly the room acoustics and the sound of the source!!
It works up until the physics of the actual headphones let you down, and with STAX that is outside the hearing range (and the transient response of electrostatics is of course wonderful).
So -- for the cost of going to measurement rooms -- tourist attractions of the next decade -- you can own (OK, not own, but listen to all the time) every high end speaker system you have ever wanted, and attend concerts whenever you want at the venue you visited (your choice of music, you just borrowed the acoustics).
The high-end audiophile game just changed forever. It's over for high-end speaker manufacturers (already was with DIY at-home room-correction DSP, like Lyngdorf, just too expensive still).
We will be carrying our SVS SD cards to CanJam 2011. And let's hope Apple introduces the SVS SD card reader on the iPod sooner than that.
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