Another angle on this issue ... I recently heard Conrad Johnson criticized for have a short product range: scarcely a dozen products and all amps and preamps. Another example is Pass Labs. There is no doubt these company make product that is great and entirely their own. What's my point?

I get suspicious when I see a company making a "full range" or products: amps, players, DACs, speakers, phono equipment, speakers. Can a small or medium-sized company be good at all these things? Can they do the research and product development for all these things? Likely not. Almost inevidably they have to buy not just technology but actual product for other companies. And if they have a "high-end" image and, more particularly, a high-end distribution channel, they have to have high markup to make their profits. So now we're talking about the likes of Lexicon; (the fact that they might be owned by Harmon International doesn't make them a big company).

The more integrated a technology, the more suspicious I get about the value for high-price product. E.g. DACs >$1500 that use only off-the-shelf Texas Instruments LSI chips, (or Wolfson for that matter). Using these chips, DAC design and construction is relatively simple, and even with high quality peripheral components, it only costs so much to built a unit apart from milled face plates and such cosmetic extras. (DACs like those from dCS and EMM Labs are rather different because they use a lot of discrete components.)