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Originally Posted by krmathis /img/forum/go_quote.gif
I also understand that $3-4.000 electrostatic amplifiers never will be any vendors best seller. Their lowest priced unit will most probably take that place. With "masses" I mean a bit more than 10/12 units, but certainly not mass-production in 100's of units.
But I just think it would be more time efficient to construct and fine tune one really good amplifier, then spend more time building that amplifier. Than to constantly construct new amplifiers (one after another), and spend less time building them...
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The Aristaeus is not a $4000 amplifier. Justin realized that during the year he spent finishing the design. If he had known going in what the end product would cost him in terms of parts and time, the price would likely have been in the $6000-$8000 range. However, he honored his original price by reducing his profit significantly. His return on his investment was much lower than it should have been.
There is actually very little economics of scale in building a high-end amp. In order to build more amps, the builder has to buy more parts and invest more time. You do reach a point where you know which parts to buy, and how to build the amp efficiently, but all of the top amps are hand-built in the end, and there's a limit to how much you can shave parts costs without affecting quality. The low parts quantity does not allow for much leverage with parts suppliers, unless you can combine parts with other projects to make some large orders. And chassis suppliers are a nightmare unto themselves, almost regardless of quantity. But the same limited market that's not going to buy in quantity means that unless you've sold out the production run in advance, you've got a lot of parts and effort (read: money) sitting on a shelf waiting for a customer.
Tying up large sums of money in amps sitting on a shelf can kill a small operation (and also larger ones). They simply can't do a production run and wait to sell the amps, unless they've got some serious capital investment behind the company. Most of the people building headphone amps simply don't have that kind of resources. Yes, it would be more efficient to fine-tune and build a larger production run (assuming that your customers all want exactly the same thing, which they normally don't).
I'm sure if you were willing to provide the backing capital, any of the companies who build electrostatic amps (and probably some that normally don't) would be happy to do it. If the amps sell quickly, you might see a nice return on your investment. If the amps don't sell rapidly, or don't sell at all, just how long would you be able to go without return on that investment? Would you be able to lose money if the product didn't sell enough to cover costs? That's the kind of question an amp builder has to ask himself before even starting a project.
The Marantz is a much better stat' then the ESP9 could ever be compared on the same amp. . The only vintage American stat' manufacturer that did something good was Suprex although they were far from perfect. 