It is confusing what the company is doing. Why didn't they make the best amp they could for V3SE.
They could have offered a different box if people wanted it.
You heard of Apple making a best computer, BMW making a best car ?
We can make the BEST amp, but would anyone pay the price? Ref 18 is going to list for $8000 per pair, substantially higher than Ref 9V3SE. A person with a $5000 preamp, $40,000 speaker will go for the Ref 18, but many people will be VERY happy with Ref 9V3SE.
We might be able to offer power supply upgrade to Ref 9V3SE but we haven't looked into it (still working on the SMPS for Ref 18 etc). Nuforce pricing policy has always been very reasonable, especially after you invested in the initial purchase. We don't charge you arm and leg for upgrades and trade-in can be offered at reasonable price. Basically your first purchase helps to finance not just past R&D but future R&D. I don't know any other high-end company would charge a lowly $400 for a complete replacement of the amp technology. We spent more than a year and many tests on V3 and what we charge just barely pay for the effort. Most companies will charge you $400 just to do a minor upgrade
If you have 3 V2 amps and struggle with what to do, we can offer a small discount on the upgrade and then you can contact us 4 months later to beta test the power supply upgrade for the bass amps.
We have a customer in Virgina with 11 Ref 9V2SE (3 front, 3 on each side, 3 back for a very large home theater)
The Power of Ref 18 is not going to be substantially higher than Ref 9V3SE if we measure the output RMS voltage but we plan to increase the current a lot so that it can drive power hungry (most are current hungry speaker).
For Ref 18, we are doing things that we can't do on Ref 9V3SE, such as
top of the line WBT Speaker terminals
17" wide heavy chassis
splitting the amp board into two boards (preamp and power amp section), upgrade whatever parts at all cost, modify the amp to work for bigger power supply, etc.
If you are a new customer and this is what you want, then go for Ref 18.
For existing customer,
V2 -> V3 -- trade-in to Ref 18 -->
or
V2 -- trade-in to Ref 18 -->
will cost the same. Going with the V3 upgrade, at least you have a chance to experience V3 before making the big plunge to Ref 18.
We plan our products and pricing so that customers can take it one step at a time.
We could have charged $500 for V2 to V3 upgrade since many customers are "captive" as long as we keep upgrade pricing reasonable. But trying to milk as much as possible out of customers is plain wrong.
We just stick to a formula and apply a multiple that take into consideration of production cost, R&D cost, and projected size of the market.
If you study the luxury product market, the price/performance is always the best for those mid price products. Icon HDP would have an off the chart price/performance ratio since we price it at $399. The DAC-9 at $1250 is not going to be 3X better. I don't even think DAC-9 will be 50% better. DAC-9 is going to be really good, that's not the problem. The problem is that Icon HDP is too good
. But that's the way it is in high performance. You pay a lot more for the very last bit of performance gain.
Even the soon to be shipping Icon uDAC at $99 sounded better than a very popular $600 DAC that we compared against.
This is one of the moment where I feel like sharing our philosophy. I don't usually talk so much
