ARC Ref 5se inferior to LS28?

Ha! It seems like progress is a circular phenomenon, coming back around to where you started, only slightly higher up the flagpole (as Donovan Leitch put it, "First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is".). The claims for improvements are wildly exaggerated imo, with promises of many veils removed in each new model. I’ve seen a statement from ARC that a lot of their customers replace their current model with every other new model, skipping one---Ref 1 to Ref 3, for instance. So ARC is very aware of the phenomenon, perhaps tailoring their product development and marketing to what they believe their customer base will accept and support.

Analogluvr put it perfectly with his "giving their customers good value" statement. That is exactly the point I was trying to make. My comparison of the cost of ownership between an ARC and an Atma-Sphere pre-amp---just one example---makes the contrast pretty clear. There are a lot of small high-end companies doing as Atma-Sphere does---offering updates to owners of long-running models, to keep them competitive with new models from ARC and others. Keith Herron does it, as does VPI, Eminent Technology, Rega, Tri-Planar, Pass Labs, CAT, and plenty of others. Whether or not any given ARC piece is better than it’s price-point competition is an individual assessment, but the ARC buyer should be aware that the model he is buying will be discontinued before too long, and all subsequent R & D will be put into it’s replacement model, the owners current model becoming a dead-end component, no improvement to it offered. To get an improvement, he must sell his current ARC piece and buy the new one---that’s the ARC business model. The other companies invest their time and energy into improving the already-existing model, offering updates for a nominal charge, maintaining the investment the owner has made in his component from that company.

That issue of Stereophile was my initiation into audiophiledom, and the ARC SP-3 my first serious pre-amp. My dearly departed pal Brooks Berdan sold ARC when he was at GNP in Pasadena, but by the time he opened his own shop (Brooks Berdan Ltd.) in nearby Monrovia, ARC designs had become hybrids, rather than purely tube. Brooks kept his tubed SP-10, finding the hybrid SP-11 somewhat "dry and white", as he put it. At that time I had an SP-6b that I bought from Steve McCormick, which I ended up selling to Brooks. Both the SP3 and SP-6, as well as the SP-10, are the classic ARC purely tube pre-amps.

Brooks became a dealer for Jadis, VTL, and Music Reference, all still making pure-tube electronics. He took in a lot of ARC from people who liked the pure tube sound of those companies products more than the hybrid sound of ARC. But Bill Johnson and Rich Larsen kept working at making their hybrid circuits sound more tubey and less solid state, and eventually got rid of the ss nasties that Brooks and some others (Harry Pearson at TAS) found objectionable. That was years ago, and ARC is still at the top of the heap. They are unquestionably the most influential high-end company of them all, but they did put out the occasional turkey! I agree with the comments above, that the way to buy ARC is used. But if you buy a power amp, you had better have a dealer who does repair work nearby. If you have an output tube go bad, you're gonna need him!

Darn it, I was sucked in again and got carried away, losing the point I had intended to make. Of course ARC makes great sounding gear, and deserves all the success and satisfied customers they have earned over the past forty-seven years. And they have indeed stayed at the top of the game by keeping their R & D an ongoing effort. The analogy to automobile development is an apt one, one with which I have no beef. There are a lot of companies that stagnated and eventually died because of a failure to continue to improve its products.

But looking at it from the perspective of a potential purchaser, I keep coming back to example, only one I could cite, of the Atma-Sphere products. If one accepts the premise that the current incarnation of the A-S MP-3 pre-amp and the ARC LS27 (or any other ARC pre-amp of roughly comparable price) are in the same ball park (even if each will be favored by different people), what has the owner of each had to spent in order to now have their quality?

The owner of the MP-3 has spent the cost of the original plus those of the infrequent factory updates. The updates have been relatively minor in nature (and cost), the basic circuit and design remaining the same---it was a "finished", fully realized design and execution.

For the ARC owner, the story is very different. If the current A-S MP-3 is only slightly improved from it's original version, how much better was it at the time of it's introduction in comparison to the same-period ARC? I mean, it has taken all the intervening ARC pre-amps to get to where the A-S MP-3 is now, assuming my premise for the sake of argument. All this time the A-S owner could have been enjoying the sound quality of the MP-3, while the ARC owner has either had to make due with the apparently sub-par sound of his LS-15/16/17/whatever, or send his current pre-amp to ARC for installation of the latest in the frequent updates, or even more costly, sell the old pre-amp and buy the new, completely redesigned model. It appears to me that the changes made to each ARC model---from the LS-16 to the LS-16 Mk.2 for instance, were repeated in every single model. It's as if Rich Larsen had to rediscover everything he learned on the improvements made in the previous model for the next. The ARC circuits keep getting more and more complicated, the circuit boards more cluttered. My EAR pre looks almost empty in comparison.

In the 50's/60's/70/s, American car companies offered completely-redesigned versions of their models every two years or so, while BMW improved their product line incrementally, building on the already "correct" platform of the 3-series, 5-series, and 7-series. I drove my 528e for fifteen years, getting 230,000 miles of driving pleasure out of it. The design and build quality was already fully developed at the time of it's introduction, no need to completely redo it and offer a replacement model two years down the road (no pun intended! :-).

The difference in design approach implies that Ralph Karsten knew way before the ARC team how to achieve a given level of sound quality at a given price. If one had bought an MP-3 twenty-five years ago, he all this time could have enjoyed the sound quality it provides. The ARC customer, in contrast, would only now have that sound quality, in effect investing in the ARC design teams education!

A comparable, though not exact, parallel could be made in the world of loudspeakers. An enthusiast could buy a pair of the original QUAD ESL's in the late 50's, owning them without needing to make any changes to them as other designers endeavored to equal their sound quality in their own designs. It took literally decades for other speakers to appear which equaled any of the QUADS abilities, some of which most other speakers still lack! Peter Walker spent years developing the original QUAD, not releasing it until it was a "finished" design. He spent even longer (almost two decades) getting it's follow-up, the QUAD 63, fully ready for market. That's my kind of designer, and my kind of product. The kicker is that buying this kind of product from this kind of designer and company not only gives you better sound at an earlier moment in time, but is cheaper in the long run---a win win!

As my Mama useta say, "Each to her own, said the lady as she kissed the cow". ARC loves their customer base the same way Trump "loves the poorly educated". If the newest ARC pre-amp is sooo much better than the one it's replacing, and that one was sooo much better than the one before it, how bad was the one they sold you three, four, five generations back? And how much have you spent to get where you are now?

What I'm saying is that there are other companies making competitive products that don't suck nearly as much dough out of your wallet, products that haven't needed nearly as many changes to stay competitive as have the ARC's. And better built, ta boot. Talk to any experienced EE tech about the design and build of ARC products, particularly their power amps. Yup, I've said it before. Truth is timeless. I've owned ARC, and I've owned Atma-Sphere. I now own Music Reference. Roger spends years perfecting his designs before bringing them to market, not using his customers as unpaid design consultants.

Anyone who gets on the ARC train is going to be put through this until he jumps off. Why not instead buy from a designer/company who keeps a model in the line for many years, offering occasional upgrades to the basically "correct/finished" circuit?

As an example, if one had bought a, say, Atma-Sphere MP-3 pre-amp twenty-five years ago, one could still own it, having had the occasional factory improvement made to it. Total investment? Not that much more than the MP-3's original price. The ARC owner, in contrast, would have sold his LS2 to get the New! Improved! LS15, then sold it to get the LS16, then the LS25, then LS26 (or LS17?), then LS27, with Mk.2 iterations of each. Or, jumped up to a Reference model---1, then 2, then 3, then 5. And the Atma-Sphere MP-3 is STILL more transparent than all of them! Or at least some people think so.

ARC owners get very defensive when this is brought up, and who can blame them? I met Bill Johnson in 1973, and shortly thereafter bought a complete ARC system---SP3, D51 and D75, and Tympani I (ARC distributed Magneplanar at the time). Before the capacitors were even "broken in" there were new versions of all those models. Bill was a decent engineer, but an even better businessman. I have kept my LS1, solely for it's mode switch!