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RE: Not sure what Bob Ludwig has to do with this stuff in the first place

"Do you actually think amplifiers are normally machine-assembled? There may be a small number of fully-automated steps such as machine insertion of parts into a circuit board, and use of a wave solder machine to solder the circuit board. These techniques usually result in improved quality due to decreased chance for human error such as cold solder joints and whatnot. The rest is hand assembly."

This is slightly disingenuous. I've worked with companies that produce low-quantity, essentially custom daughter boards for PCs. The costs of such custom products are huge. You might end up paying more for a single board than you would a whole office full of Dells.

In audio, op-amps are a perfect example of this. Off the shelf op-amps cost next to nothing. Marantz HDAM op-amp modules are relatively expensive, but can still be inserted into cheap players and amplifiers because the economies of scale are still there. I had a Deltec 50S amplifier which used op-amps effectively built to order. Those op-amps were the single most expensive part of the product - more expensive than the casework even. The advantage to those ever more custom op-amps was ever more linearity.

I'm not sure how much of this applies to the DZ amplifiers... they look very 'bling' to me. But if the product contains lots of essentially built to order daughterboards sitting on a motherboard made in tiny numbers, it might go some way to explaining the expense.

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