Quote Originally Posted by Ajani
That sounds like a good definition: essentially a no holds barred approach to creating a product... no expense spared in either R&D or Materials... just the best thing a company can design...

I also would expect tech from SOTA to trickle down to gear I can afford eventually... Still, I see no need (other than to entertain myself) to audition SOTA gear, if they are not within my budget...
This sounds very reasonable, at least on the face of it. But I know too that while some of the "no holds barred approach" contributes to performance, much of it is just BLING.

And I will argue that this is true not only for silver transformers but also a lot of supposed innovations. E.g. have you checked out analog preamps lately? They are remarkably simple devices, whether tube or s/s: one must ask how much better can a $25,000 device sound than the $500 device? Of course one might prefer the fine materials and appearance of the $25k unit -- so much so the one might ascribe to it more sonic improvement than it actually has.

So case in point, the highly praised MBL 6010D preamp is ~$25k, (see 'Phile review HERE). But the design is based on opamps, (widely reviled devices), and if based on opamps, how much better does it sound than the $500 Chinese knock-off, say from DIYGene, (see HERE). 50x better? 5x better? 1.05x better? Who knows? In any case one can't deny that much of the SOTA technology has already tricked down.