It has come to my attention all the model changes are confusing people...no need for any confusion, I constantly redesign product lines and continue development for the pro end of my business. I look at sales vs. what I think is a viable product and I try to find a happy medium in order to promote sales to continue my habit of designing products and put food on the table. The Studio Reference and the PE Studio have allowed me to redesign several products and scale them down to offer the consumer a more effective way to do things without breaking the bank.
At present I'm in the process of redesigning the V Pro Custom series to offer a less expensive package without loosing performance...The Pro Custom circuit really is the crown jewel of power conditioning that I have found in the last several years, we took our PE Studio and broke it down into three different parts in order to design the V series. it's a shame the Pro Custom portion of the V series never took off, but I'm sure pricing had a lot to do with the low sales, which is why I decided to redesign the Pro Custom package and offer more bang for the buck at a lower cost. The IEC filter concept opens the door to offer the Pro Custom at a lower cost without loosing one ounce of performance...actually gaining performance because the filter is placed closer to the component. The Reference Two is another option....eliminating the $20 per foot Studio Reference cable and all the extras (plugs, quartz, etc) that make up the cable opens the door for more aggressive filtering with lower production cost. The Ref Two is a Pro Custom, Ref One, Reference PC combo, specially designed for the Reference line.....this filter is excellent for folks that own our Reference power cords, but don't want or unable to install our RPC.....The Two plugs into the wall and turns the circuit into one super large RPC v2.........in all honesty pending how sales go we may just drop the RPC v2 idea and just go with the Ref Two...and just run the RPC v2 as a Limited Edition over the next couple of months....we'll see because we have already took a decent number of pre-sales on the RPC v2...I will let the market decide....but the Ref Two is here to stay and offers killer performance at a killer price.....the Two can easily be put up against $3k PLC's and hold it's own.
The lower end V S/AC and IEC filters have sold well and we have no plans to change the designs and still highly recommend them for any installation.
The RPC has also been a big hit and sales are slowly picking up....so this little guy isn't going anywhere for at least the next year.
Low end PE sales have fallen off....that was to be expected...we sold over 1700 to the consumer market last year and only had 7 returned
We submitted multiple samples earlier in the year to a few high-end magazines with the hope a review or two would hit during the summer, obviously that didn't happen. I would hate to take the PE off the product list because it's really a fantastic little product with unlimited potential.
As many have noted the past couple of months via email, we have removed the III from the line up, but to be honest it is really becoming expensive to produce do to the metal markets, just the 14k internal wiring is $112 for the amount we need, too expensive to keep in stock, but still highly recommended...the level of detail offered by this filter is like no other I have ever heard....absolutely scrumptious!!! We plan to do a special order for the PE III during the Labor Day sale....so if you are interested check it out...I think we are offering a limited number for just under $180....all I can say is pick them up while stocks last.
Lets see what else do we have??? The Ref cable...I love it...and it not going anywhere....it's one of the best power cords under $500 that I have heard....it's different from the Studio Reference line, but offers the same calibre of musical satisfaction, and better noise reduction and bandwidth....which is why I finally dropped the SR line after 10 years. Hopefully we can get more of these bad boys out the door and start some buzz on the product because it's really killer stuff....can't beat the performance for the price. ARC owners take notice...the Reference power cable is a match made in heaven.
The new Reference IC's are sounding good...I'm loving the XLR cable off the Benchmark Dac1 pre....it's another match made in heaven.
This is for Dac1 owners looking to kick it up several notches....3 products are going to light a match under the Benchmark and kick it to the next stratosphere....I use the Reference power cable combined with a Pro Custom IEC filter on the a/c and the Reference IC XLR on the output....I have compared the combo to $8k and $9k dacs and feel extremely comfortable with saying the Benchmark/AM designs combo is one of the finest dac combos you'll find period!!! If you own a Dac 1 at least try the IEC filter, the transformation of the Dac1 is a real eye opener.
