What Does 80 Grand Get You Nowadays?

My days of big 2-channel gear are decades behind me (all my audio gear now is desktop/home office-based). But a couple weeks ago I went to a big audio show in New Jersey and heard systems costing a great deal of money, many in the $100K to $500K range. With the 3 exceptions noted below, the speakers in particular sounded shriekingly bright, edgy. I couldn't live with most of those systems.

Three exceptions:

1. Quad: their latest iteration of the electrostatic panels sounded quite good
2. Legacy Audio: I heard two Aeris systems in the show. Both sounded somewhat bright, but definitely promising. IMHO those 2 AMT tweeters put out a ton of high frequency energy that's not completely balanced out by the 4 x woofers (but that balance can easily by changed by their crossover/processor). Even better was the considerably more expansive Valor speakers. I could live with either model.
3. Audio Note: I seriously doubt whether those classic speakers can sound bright under any conditions.

I am all for copying, reverse engineering, whatever you wanna call it. I just get mildly irritated if ya toot your horn too much as if you were something ’exceptional’, after you’d done it.

What entitles you to be irritated?  Reverse engineering means analyzing an existing product to understand how it works in terms of its design, components, and underlying principles. It’s often performed to learn, improve, or ensure compatibility and is recognized as a legitimate engineering practice in many industries, provided it doesn’t violate patents, trade secrets, or copyrights. Copying, on the other hand, refers to replicating a product without adding originality or innovation, often with the intent to duplicate it directly and, in many cases, infringing on intellectual property rights.

@lanx0003 

How do you feel about having exact copies made of, say, unobtainium circuit boards, to restore vintage hifi gear? Say the original PCB was damaged by overheating to the extent it’s no longer safe to use.

Technically you’d be infringing on the manufacturer’s IP, but said manufacturer has gone out of business or it no longer services so-called legacy products, essentially narrowing down your options to a) reverse-engineer the original PCB and have copies made by JLCPCB or another such service, or b) take your gear apart and sell the good pieces on eBay.

Not an uncommon situation on the DIY side of this hobby. 

Op, Based on my research on their website, services provided by JLCPCB include (1) PCB fabrication, (2) PCB assembly and (3) 3D printing and CNC.  I might miss something but you got an idea.  So essentially they are a service provider who receives the design file uploaded by DIYers and fabricate PCB for them, with an option to assemble components provided by LCSC on the PCB.  They do not verify if the uploaded design files are legit, free of infringement of someone’s IP, nor do they own the design after manufacturing.  They simply fabricate / assembly PCB according to the DIYers’ request.

I am not a DIYer, so I don’t have knowledge of the general practices or ethical codes in the DIY community. You could possibly advise the general audience here about that if you belong to the community.

I have alot of legacy audio and like them.wispers,focus,aries,valor.  I Do like the ribbon planar tweeters.the wood in them is great he has an organ company do the wood. Recently merged with an investor and hope the company does not change much.they are now putting alot of ice modules in thier base. Also the wavelet dsp they are using is great. Enjoy the search. I have bought almost all used so 80k turns into 240k. Plus it's fun to meet other audiophile when I travel to pick it up.