Nice to know you are not falling prey to market segmenting, to science, to bang-for-the-buck, to dinking-by-the-label, to the great pastime of record book thinking, to one-upmanship, to attempting to isolate one component in a chain and declaring it superior in every way to all others of its type, to negative bias against larger established companies, to positive bias in favour of small cottage industry builders, to audio jewellery, to equating everything that goes into a product with mo' better sound, to assuming everyone will just go along with your premise, to soliciting answers from the horses mouth (they should tell you they are smarter, more honest, have better hearing and more taste than any other builder, that they alone can defy physics and that they have arcane knowledge not possessed by other manufacturers and that you are in good hands with Allstate) and to being so earnest in wanting to know what in the physical world they do to make the sound so good. This question basically will have the folks lining up on either side of the great divide we have all come to know and love: magic vs. science, objective vs. subjective, you know. Look, if you think, hear and feel in your heart that any product, be it a power amp, preamp, source, cable or speaker, or any tweak, be it bubblegum, bubble pack, cones, spheres, etc, sound better, don't ask any further questions. You have found IT, and once you have found IT, everything else becomes irrelevant, especially explanations having to do with the physical world. I second the posters who have basically asked that you go ever your premise first. And thank TWL for, yet again, proving that the mental sampling rate of non-believers in the GREAT SUBJECTIVE AUDIOPHILE THING is too low. A couple of questions before I go: how high can prices go? How many times can the word "ULTRA" be added as a prefix to a newly established market segment in order to pick the pockets of the insecure?
high-end vs. ultra high-end amplifiers
It is quite frustrating to know that some amplifiers (Boulder, FM Acoustics, Accuphase) are sounding better than even very expensive ones from the big boys (Mark Levinson, Krell, Bryston, Spectral). I wonder why there is such a difference. Madrigal, Krell, Bryston, Spectral, they all belong to the high-end sector of audio industry and they are claiming they are making the best amplifiers. But I know that this is not true: I've heard amplifiers from Boulder and FM Acoustics and they sound just better than the Madrigals, Krells and so on. Is it because Boulder and FM Acoustics have more know how about amplifier design (I suppose not) or do they use more expensive parts and better circuit topologies? Do they have brighter technicians and designers? There must be an explanation for this phenomenon. It isn't magic! Maybe someone from the audio industry can reply to this thread.