Will the same man who designed the original NuForce amplifiers be employed in designing NuPrime product?
The same man who designed the NuForce Ref 9V1 left NuForce in 2006 !!!
A different way to ask the same question is "How do we keep the innovation and sound quality?"
First and most important is the patented design principle, not the actual design itself. And throughout the years, we hired exceptional engineers to improve upon the design.
The Reference series continue with the evolution from the original design and implementation since 2005, every few years we improve something significant. And for other series, we have new designs. An analogy will be like the Porsche cars. Reference series is like the 911 product line. IDA-16 uses a different design than Reference series. The soon to be released ST-10 uses yet another design that we are giving it the Reference LE class. Similar to cars, each design have certain performance characteristic and cost. For example, some amplifier design requires the use of two power supplies for positive and negative rail so the final product cost will be high.
For product plan and sound quality, I continue to lead the company, one that I co-founded since 2004. Each year, after consultation with distributors and feedback from customers, we have ideas of what to do for the next generation. Besides internal audition, we engage the same audiophile distributors from Japan, France and elsewhere to assist us during our R&D process.
It takes a lot of work to do original R&D (instead of buying a module from somewhere else) but we get to control our own designs and are able to differentiate our products.
Jason