If you wanted a new exhaust system for your car custom-made in order to increase your car's performance, do you buy the readily available inexpensive steel tubing that you can buy everywhere, then fab and install the system yourself? Would you have the time, design know-how, tools, experience, etc to do the job? Or would it be easier to bring it to a shop that specialized in exhaust systems and knew what they were doing and pay them to do it? If you wanted to install a metal roof on your house and needed some new custom flashing for around the windows and doors for better water drainage, would you buy the readily available inexpensive flatstock sheet metal, take the time to lay out the design and have the tools to do the job? Or would you go to a metal shop, tell them what you need and pay them to build it? I could and it would be easy for me to do and dirt cheap because I am a metal worker by trade and have the knowledge, experience and tools to do the job. Here's the point: Not everyone out here in audioland is experienced enough in electronics to come up with a design, know what parts to look for, have the ability to install and test the parts in order to figure out what works and doesn't work, nor do many of us have the knowledge to understand circuits, power supplies, etc etc etc. I wouldn't have the faintest idea where to start on modding an amp, but if what I heard from the stock SLA1 is any indication of what its sonic potential could be, I'll gladly pay Don the $$$ to mod my stock amp. Plus he has a new metal case built and powder-coated specifically for his modded amp. Check the shop rates at your local metal shop and see what they would charge for something like that as it ain't cheap, especially for small order's like Don's. Why can't you guys just wait until Don has an amp ready to go as he already has said that he will send one out for inspection to the audio geek community when he's ready? Then you can tear it apart, take pictures and tell everyone what parts he uses and what they would run on the open market. Are you concerned that we're going to be ripped off by Don? Doubt it. In the meantime, why don't you open up some readily available commercial amps (or POWER CABLES and SPEAKER WIRE) that the audio community drools over (and whose manufacturers make wild unsubstantiated claims about) and tell us all what cheap parts the manufacturer is using wrapped in a nice case that are inside those pretty boxes as that would be much more interesting to many of us than you guys speculating on what exactly Don Nance is up to before anyone has actually seen or heard the amp? Wait till Don has an amp ready, get one in your hands, then start ripping. Hell I'll send you mine if Don won't send you one, because if I were him, after all this I wouldn't even bother. And as far as Don changing the design of the amp and not posting pictures of the finished product before its release: Barnes has been doing that at norh for years and he still has people brown-nosing him whenever he announces a new product long in advance of when he actually delivers or fails to deliver his stuff.
