$510.00 for an Aluminum cover for the ARC Ref. 10?

Ha! That is so funny, and so great. Roger sees the designs of a lot of expensive electronics as gratuitous and vulgar. He can point to particular aspects in the results of a John Aldridge Stereophile bench test, ascribe them to elements of the circuit's design, and predict the behavior of the circuit with different speaker loads. He did just that with the D'Agostino power amp, wondering why anyone would want to own or even listen to such a poorly designed amp. He tore it to shreds, one design aspect at a time. Absolutely brilliant! Being an expert in tube amp design, Roger highly disapproves of amps with large numbers of tubes, explaining exactly why it is a bad idea, and why.

Roger is very different from a lot of the designers in High End, having a normally-sized ego in spite of his vast knowledge, abilities, and creativity. I'm sure he and Keith Herron would get on great. If I was in the market for a lower powered tube amp, the Music Reference RM-10 would be my first choice. Roger's new products include an ESL speaker with a dedicated, direct coupled, transformer-less tube power amp. For owners of high-efficiency speakers he has a number of low-power triode (SE and otherwise) amps at very reasonable prices.

Why Roger and his products aren't more widely owned and talked about is a complete mystery to me. Sure, he isn't much into marketing, and doesn't have a vast dealer network (thankfully I had Brooks Berdan, a big fan of Roger and his products, as a dealer. And Brooks was extremely critical.). But if I know of him, I see no reason why anyone else can't.

Pehare, I neglected to mention the amp of Rogers that should be of particular interest to Magneplanar owners. The RM-300 is a 300 watt mono block (with the same basic circuit as that of the RM-200) which may be the best tube amp available for driving Maggies. Why? Because, unlike all other tube amps of which I am aware, it's power output increases with falling impedance, not decreases. Many Maggie owners have to settle for solid state amps because tubes don't like the very low impedance load the speaker presents an amp, when they would rather use a tube amp. The RM-300 makes that possible. Unfortunately the amp is $9000, $18,000 a pair. Still, that's less than a lot of the more well known and owned amps that Maggie users buy.

Neglected to mention, the 6 inch fan has rubber feet so won't scratch the preamp cover. It is available through Amazon. I use it on an ARC Ref 5se preamp.

A long time ago I worked in high tech aerial photography and we used Zeiss cameras. We lost a lens cover which is a square aluminum plate with a tab on one end and a handle and latch on other. Zeiss wanted something like $3K for the lens cover to go onto a $400K camera. Of course, you can consider that it is designed to ride in bottom of a plane and if something comes loose it could be a big problem, etc. We took another one to a local machine shop and had it reconstructed from scratch for $500 and it worked perfectly.

In the ARC case, the customer alienation factor of having someone sitting there looking at their amp and thinking of how they got ripped off every time they look at it would not be worth it in the grand scheme. The company's success will not rest upon the sale of $510 covers.

why have a cover at all? most of the RF is generated by ICs and comes in via the power cord anyway. if its dust cover you're worried about get a nice room air purifier. components frequently sound better with the cover off. plus you will have easier access to the component for all that tweaking.