Raquel: I don't think it was ever Mr Stevens' intention to sell $50k amplifiers for the long haul. Nobody survives on this very long. He simply needed to recover the R&D costs for the all-out assault to develop the finest output transformers that I suspect he was very eager to do. Surely a lot of different materials, topologies, etc., were tried and ultimately not acceptable until the one finally to meet (or come as close as possible at the time to meet) the desired specification.
We all know a lot of software is re-written and much hardware is thrown in the recycle or trash bins for the sake of R&D. The cost of time and parts to build a production unit does not at all reflect the cost it took to get there. And with a "limited" production run, the recipients of those units pay a high cost for any improvements.
Do you really think there is a $20k, a $10k or even a $5k cost in the ultimate hardware/materials updates to the JL-1 signature to make it an L.E.? Of course not! The sonic improvements from this effort could be phenomenol. But the price here is all about R&D costs to achieve that last improvement of the JL-1 before focus was to shift to the next generation amplifier. I suspect the ultimate cost to push this new technology into the later models was rather low once Mr. Stevens had the materials and process in place.
Rather than wait to recover these costs on later amp designs, several JL-1 amps were obviously available for a "limited" production run with the latest transformers. And no doubt Mr. Stevens made other improvements that he had discovered along the way. It is how engineers work. 8-)
Once the L.E. costs were recovered, the Signature and Limited Edition suffixes could be removed as the new JL-2 and JL-3 models were soon to follow. And now we have already seen a JL-3 signature appear that according to Brian is $8k more than the standard JL-3 with most likely improvements beyond just the output transformer. Again, I am not surprised as I have read many articles that Mr. Stevens is constantly improving his products but does not follow each update with a new model suffix nor with a higher price that we often see elsewhere in this industry.
Do we need to learn of a L.E. model at a much higher price to finally feel that the JL-1 L.E. has been replaced by a new top CAT amp? That seems rather silly. Perhaps when Mr. Stevens is eager to do another all-out assault with one of his designs, it just might end up in a new model at a lower price than the current top model. So what will it be...a $40-50k JL-3 L.E. or a $20k JL-5 stereo amp that takes the current JL-3 signature to the next level? I think we get too focused on the model designation and the costs here.
One final thing: When an engineer designs a state of the art product that takes the world by storm, as surely did the JL-1 in all its versions, that engineer does not simply stop there. There are always things to improve upon. I have never heard of an engineer to be satisfied to simply say, "hey, I did the best once, now second best at a lower cost will be fine from here on". There's simply too much drive to continue to do better and even at much lower cost. And this is the JL-2 and JL-3 series.
John
