Anyone who gets on the ARC train is going to be put through this until he jumps off. Why not instead buy from a designer/company who keeps a model in the line for many years, offering occasional upgrades to the basically "correct/finished" circuit?
As an example, if one had bought a, say, Atma-Sphere MP-3 pre-amp twenty-five years ago, one could still own it, having had the occasional factory improvement made to it. Total investment? Not that much more than the MP-3's original price. The ARC owner, in contrast, would have sold his LS2 to get the New! Improved! LS15, then sold it to get the LS16, then the LS25, then LS26 (or LS17?), then LS27, with Mk.2 iterations of each. Or, jumped up to a Reference model---1, then 2, then 3, then 5. And the Atma-Sphere MP-3 is STILL more transparent than all of them! Or at least some people think so.
ARC owners get very defensive when this is brought up, and who can blame them? I met Bill Johnson in 1973, and shortly thereafter bought a complete ARC system---SP3, D51 and D75, and Tympani I (ARC distributed Magneplanar at the time). Before the capacitors were even "broken in" there were new versions of all those models. Bill was a decent engineer, but an even better businessman. I have kept my LS1, solely for it's mode switch!
