Of course we are sorry that George had a problem with his preamps. PrimaLuna is well-known to have amongst the best build quality in the industry, regardless of price. This has been stated over and over by the most technically adept reviewers in the industry, and anybody who is pragmatic can study our quality in pictures and videos, and see for themselves. If you can point to a better built preamp for twice the price I would like to hear about it so I can applaud it.
I did not call George once. I called him several times. And I was never arrogant. I was as nice and as apologetic as I could be. When I first heard about the problem I was on vacation in Europe and stopped everything to contact him as well as the dealer, and we jumped on this with engineers and technicians working both in the U.S. and in Holland. My wife Laura understood it was important, and I thank her for that. I kept him updated, and because George had said more than once how much he loves the DiaLogue Premium I thought he wanted them back. So I didn’t just offer him a pair of tubes, but some expensive, vintage Mullards, Brimars, or Ciftes. He said it didn’t need it and liked it as-is.
We sell a lot of these, and if there were many problems everybody would hear about it. But we have not. Now we have a customer with two nearly identical systems, in the same home, with the exact same failure. Exact same. It was a small cap in the right channel, NOT the Mundorf coupling caps. We suspect an oscillation as my service tech here works for another brand that was faced with the same problem. But we will never know for sure. It’s unfortunate that any amp is able to pass DC as others have mentioned. Tube amps don’t. Most solid state amps don’t. But Bryston’s decisions are not my business.
In the meantime we are going to replace the caps in question in all the preamps we have in stock just in case there was a bad batch, and also made a small modification to the preamp. It was covered in-depth, and we considered any and every strange occurrence that could happen.
FWIW George did not buy the power supply as he states. He told me Martin Logan warranted it. I will contact the factory about that, but I suspect they are fine with us. Martin Logan has borrowed PrimaLuna from us to demonstrate their speaker’s at large national shows, and we’ve been very helpful to each other. Last Tuesday a Martin Logan Executive bought a PrimaLuna DiaLogue Premium for his own system.
By the way I’d like to thank Ralph Karsten from Atma-Sphere for his kind words. We live in times where people are very aggressive, and forum posts look like certain tweets I wish we didn't see today.
When I speak to customers about quality, I tell them nobody builds a product like PrimaLuna …. except Atma-Sphere. Look inside whatever product you are considering purchasing.