[Ericus Rex]

It's probably exaggerated a tad, but not as much as others have said.  What do you think the engineers who created this player are salaried, how many of them are there and how long has it been in the making?  Then you have to add parts - how many prototypes did they go through?  They probably kept all of them for use as references so no recycled parts.  How many different transformers did they try?  How many brands of caps are there to sample and so forth.  So 1M may be exaggerated but I can't imagine it cost them less than 500-600K.

[DaveC113]

Their high end line is $130k for amps, preamp and converter:

http://www.stereophile.com/solidpoweramps/764/index.html

They also have lower end offerings that are a bit more reasonable.

After buying $700 worth of parts to put together a "frugal", low parts count, low wattage SET amp, I could see a cost-no-object approach could cost a lot, especially when you're making 1kW rms.

[dlon]

why do some of you guys think the R&D figure is so exaggerated?

what do you think it costs to employ several top engineers over a two year period?