Quote Originally Posted by synsei View Post
A good equipment example for this thread are Stan's DAC's. I'm sure Stan would be the first to agree that they are not as good as he could make them if money was no object, but then that would be missing the point entirely. Stan has cleverly found the middle ground and has produced a DAC that sounds great, costs very little, and the icing on the cake is that he is engaged with his customer base in the development of upgrade mods. His DAC's are as good as he can make them for the price and no one could argue that he doesn't know what his products are capable of
Indeed, Dave. I'm glad you mentioned the Beresford DAC, because along with Anthony's amps, it's another case in point, in terms of the sonic advantages of equipment made by small, specialist manufacturers.

How much continual tweaking, measuring and listening do you think Stan carries out to acheive the sonic results his DACs give? Do you think that they would achieve such high sonic standards if he simply built them to a 'required specification' and then left it at that?

No chance!

He continually strives to achieve even greater excellence with his designs, which is what all the best audio designers do, and without doubt, *that* is the recipe for creating the best sounding equipment.

John, I'll get to your last post in a moment

Marco.