[AeroSmith]

Was fortunate to have dinner with Rich from Boulder last evening. What a nice guy. And he never gets tired of Boulder questions.

One reason their products cost so much is that they make virtually everything in house, including their printed circuit boards. They do out-source the transformers. But those are all hand wound by a specialty supplier to the medical equipment industry. I can't imagine how long it might take to hand wind a transformer for a 3050! The aluminum is aircraft grade and is sourced from the Seattle area. All aluminum surfaces are then ground down to ensure complete uniformity. Every piece, from the 810 on up, is handmade by a single tech. They have one guy that assembles 1000 series pre-amps and the 1021 CD player that is apparently legendary for his attention to detail. He even tries to match all of the stainless buttons on a particular piece. And he often throws away components he deems not absolutely perfect. And of course they're constantly performing R&D. In fact they just discovered a new way of producing PCBs which apparently lowers the noise floor markedly. Oh, and did I mention their proprietary gain stages?

I'm particularly excited about the new 820 DAC that should be coming out later this year. It apparently has the DSP and DACs from the 1021. Rich claims it will sound as good or better than the 1021. And it should be a fraction of the cost. It may even have wi-fi capability. I'll definitely be on the list for one of those for our game room system.

And, this is also exciting, I was told my new 1010 and 1060 are being assembled this week. They'll hopefully be replacing the 810 and ARC DS450 in our main system before the Super Bowl. Interestingly, there has been a huge run on 1060s in the last two months. In fact orders for that piece have been so strong that they ran out of transformers this month (each 1060 uses two). And with each transformer being hand wound there's just a wee bit of lead time when they order more. The transformer shipment they're receiving this week is already allotted to 1060s. As much as folks talk about the expense of Boulder equipment, the 1060 strikes me as a decent value for what it is, one of the smoothest most dynamic high current solid state reference amps on the market (though the price is going up a grand at the end of this month).

Anyway, many thanks to Rich for making time in his travel schedule to stop by for a very illuminating evening.