Understood.It depends where you live in the world… A BHSE costs 10kish in AUS, I built my first Lundahl 1630 setup for a but less than 1k and my Sansui Alpha 907 amp was $2500 (which will actually appreciate in value and is rare).
KGSSHV Carbon plus shipping and duties will be about 12k to Australia. That is before we get to resale value where anything estat related in Australia has abysmal resale value and you simply won’t sell it again for anything less than a 30-40% loss, if it ever sells.
Anyways buy whatever you want, im not saying one is better than the other but people need to stop crapping on transformers as some sort of poor man’s inferior attempt. They offer things direct drive don’t have either…
The reason I wont buy direct drive is because its all hearsay, no analytical measurements, clones everywhere and infighting over what is best and I don’t gamble with that sort of money on something that is basically a boat anchor if I don’t like it in Australia…
But if we’re talking about building things ourselves this is completely different as one can build a carbon for $2k~ depending on the case.
And the pricing you’re talking about is only with regards to Mjolnir. $3.5k new is about the rate for European builders and resale is stable at $3k.