I bought a pair of Stratos Special Mono Extremes from Klaus about 7 or 8 years ago. I ordered them with the silver faceplates which also comes with the silver plates on the top of the amps. Unfortunately Klaus made a boo-boo and sent me black models. When I called him about the error - remember, this is years ago - he admitted that he had made an error and within a few days he shipped out the silver faces and tops. Klaus always makes good. You would think that I would have switched them but I put the replacement stuff away in a closet and forgot about it - until last week! I decided to finally silverize the amps. I figured it would be an easy task - just unscrew a few screws here and there. How hard could it be?
Guess what? It is not an easy thing to do! Once I unscrewed the top plate and looked inside it was clearly evident that I couldn't do it.
So I called a local electronics tech that has done a lot of work for me over the years and I brought him the 2 amps. At almost 62 years of age hauling these suckers is a real chore!! They are very heavy beasts!
Anyways - the tech takes a look inside and and agrees with me that getting to the black faceplates will be a lot of work.
A week has gone by and today I picked up the amps and they look great in silver.
So here comes the funny part of the story: This is a tech who works on some very expensive stuff: Levinson, Classe, Krell, etc. We get the amps into my trunk and then he says to me that he had never seen an Odyssey amp before. He asked me if they were custom made for me because he has rarely seen an amp with such high quality. He said the level of workmanship was off the charts and asked me how much I paid for them.
I said to him that I will tell him what I paid BUT only after he takes a stab at guessing the price. He thinks for a minute and says: "at least $10,000 for the pair - at least". I looked at him and said; with tongue in cheek: "you are pretty close: I think they were about $3500"
He gives me a surprised look and says: "that's not bad - $7000 for the pair is a great deal."
I reply: "$3500 for the pair, NOT each."
He gives me another confused look and says: "No way in the world - that's impossible. For that kind of quality??? Wow!! How do they make any money?"
I left feeling pretty pretty good and with a big smile on my face!
