"The Law of Diminishing Returns"???

The asking price for most new high end gear is absolutely ridiculous. Then again, if one was to introduce a reasonably priced product that was truly excellent, it wouldn't get the respect that it deserved because it was "too cheap". Folks might say "it offers great bang for the buck" but never really think of it as being "world class" simply because of the low price. Price equates to reputation, status and prestige and reputation, status and prestige are what much of "high end" sales are based on.

Having said that, finding individual components on the used market that you really like and then upgrading some of the internal parts can produce stunning results. The cost for this can be quite reasonable if one is willing to get their hands dirty rather than paying someone else to do the work & order the parts. Even most gear that is VERY expensive will benefit from such an approach. Sean
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Cdc: It helps to have background in electronics when doing mods, otherwise one ends up spending time and money that they don't have to when working blindly. By working blindly, i'm talking about people simply pulling existing caps, diodes, etc... and replacing them all with higher grade parts of equivalent ratings. While that method surely works, it is both more time consuming and less cost efficient than being able to read a schematic and picking / choosing what parts would be the most critical in terms of upgrading. There are folks that i know that have done that though and literally replaced all of the caps and diodes in a device. While they were quite happy with the results, i'm sure that they could have achieved similar results for measurably less money. Sean
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