Goldmund V.S. Pioneer !!?? - Page 6

The price for the Goldmund Eidos is £6000 GBP, not $6000 USD--almost double the price.

I'm not sure it would be considered an audiophile brand, but the NAD Masters Series M55 universal player has a list price of $1799. It seems to me that most players cost less than $12000 USD and contain significantly better parts...

Goldmund must make some decent turntables for them to have built up a solid reputation, but their newest digital products are ridiculously overpriced. Don't you think that Bentley and Aston Martin would lose their good names if they put their signature body styles on top of Toyota Camrys and sold the cars for the same price? Sure, they might be reliable and solid, but their prices would not be justified.

If you only knew. Many parts of the Ford Mondeo and Volvo can be found in the Aston Martin. The dashboard is full of them.
The pre-VW Bentley was powered by a cheap 6.7 litre block from Detroit. The radio option included... a cheap Pioneer system, but priced at a considerable mark up.

That sounds more like it but that's not the same machine we were talking about. The Linn Unidisk is a better comparator.

Fact is the market for DVD multiplayers works on the basis that if you have to replace your dedicated components in the drawing room because of their limited spouse appeal, but you still want to play the occasional CD without hurting your ears too much then you're more likely to buy an Arcam or Cyrus or if you're particularly flush maybe a Goldmund.

All these small specialist manufacturers like Linn and Naim which were once hair shirt purists have jumped on the home cinema bandwagon because it was either that or go out of business in all likelihood. Bang and Olufsen saw the writing on the wall before anyone else and so now many of the high end European brands like Revox and Goldmund are looking for a piece of this "lifestyle" cake.

If you want cutting edge home cinema though and you can hide the boxes somehow or have a dedicated home cinema space then the gadget festooned Japanese kit with all the flashing lights from the likes of Onkyo, Denon or Pioneer will do all the same things and many more besides for considerably less money.

NAD are in a different market altogether, kind of aspiring audiophile. Much like Cambridge Audio these days. They build no nonsense kit at very reasonable prices by designing in Europe and manufacturing in Taiwan. The M series is actually their latest in a long line of attempts at going upmarket.

what he said

Their design department is now in Canada. 3 of my mates working for NAD had to move lock stock and barrel to Canada after their European R&D department closed down. We used to have some great lunches in the pub next door to their office.
A little birdie told me that the TC-7510 PCB happens to be put together on the same production line as some of the better NAD stuff.
CA has next to nothing in terms of R&D. Most of the work is done by Chinese graduates with the goods rebadged CA. Sad fat is that a lot of UK audio companies are nothing more than badge names.

Does that include

Creek
Mission
Linn
Michell
Arcam
Rega

?

That would be sad indeed

Well DNM is all about R&D

or subsidiaries of Chinese conglomerates like

International Audio Group - Welcome

Wharfdale, Quad, Audiolab, Mission, Castle, Apogee....

Note: that's apogee lighting, not apogee digital, which is still in california.

My Arcam FMJ CD36 came from the UK. This is a rarity these days...

Hummm, did I detect a hint of sourness in their tone?

No I understood what he said; in my response I noted, "almost agree with everything" and "In this thread I've learned..." as opposed to "From your reply I learned..." Amongst others, I think his comments about the anti-audiophiles was spot on and something I had not though of up to that point. I thought it was insightful (not that it dictates everyone's motives in this thread however).

mmm or maybe not.

After all how many people here had even heard of Goldmund before this thread? I for one was completely unaware they even made CD and home cinema stuff.

Also if you look at what they have actually done to the mechanism it's pretty clever, basically stripping the servos and laser and remounting it all in a new enclosure made from closely toleranced metal moldings recreating a kind of Philips CDM Pro from a mass produced plastic one.

For less than 12kUSD, here's a DVD/SACD player designed and built in France which sells for less than 3.5kUSD: http://www.atoll-electronique.com/lecteurdvd.php . For sure, it doesn't look as sexy as the Goldmund, but that gives you an idea of what a good price/performance ratio should be for a small European audio manufacturer.

More up the ladder, the Linn unidisk SC, which sells for less than 5kUSD. I only found 1 picture of the inside online, and it does look a lot cleaner than the Goldmund pics in this thread: audio.de - Linn Unidisk SC, 4700 Euro

Linn Unidisk 2.1 (I guess the old generation of universal player?): was 7.5kUSD, look at the innards, now we're talking:
Linn Unidisk 2.1

No question, everybody is using Japanese drives and big name audio/video decoding chips. But, for 10+kUSD, I can guarantee you most honest / talented small audio companies based in Europe/US can do more than rebadge and change the transformer / plugs...

Even the isolation work on the drive sounds like nothing special. Everybody has to suspend mechanics on rods to fit in the new box. Now, I would like to see how they managed to create alunminums of such varying grade that their properties actually significantly help to isolate the drive... But, hey, maybe they're mechanical engineers of a special kind and can bend laws of physics

arnaud.

Here's an other example:

Naim DVD5 (CD, DVD-A,DVD-V) which sells for 5kUSD, look at the inside: Naim Audio

And even that is stuffed with cheap silicon. Transistors are dirt cheap nowdays. It's the R&D, marketing (both in print and in trade shows) and warranty/service that cost a lot. Still, it doesn't look like Goldmund did tons of R&D on those CD spinners.:cool"