Shocking Lampizator Service

Baltic 4 owner here in Canada, I had a warranty issue as well, which was resolved eventually but it was not straightforward. I suspect Horizon and Baltic owners DO get different treatment, but then again there is only one distributor in NA and Lukasz has maybe 10-15 employees so small scale "cottage industry" size without huge cash flow or cheap credit, and thus he is beholden to the ’white glove’ folks for purchasing his higher margin DACs. Frankly it’s amazing what he’s done with such limited resources - the Baltic is hands down the best DAC sonically speaking I have owned so far. I own a small business with 25 employees and I am under pressure every day deciding where and when to allocate resources.

Many years ago I bought used  adcom gear and on day one by my negligence blew out the left channel of the gfp 555 amp. I called them up as I lived near their operation in East Brunswick NJ. They told me bring in the amp with a dozen doughnuts. While I waited they fixed the amp and while at it made some other improvements/updates.

While their DACs sound fantastic, if you scan various forums I think you will notice that there is a very high rate of issues and warranty service with Lampizator. I have had three Lampi DAC’s pass through my hands and they all had issues requiring service - one prior to purchase, one while owning, and one after resell. And note the three additional examples above in this short thread alone. Build quality/QA is not there yet imho. Same goes for NA distributor - very responsive at times but they obviously mis-packed one of my DAC’s such that it got beat up during shipping. That said, the DACs sound great in the right setup (output noise can be high so proper preamp matching is critical). I am sure the Horizon sounds amazing.

Yep had issues coming out of my ears on my Atlancic, after several trips back to the factory out it went and in came a LL Echos End Reference. Never looked back you can never look back. 

The Atlantic sounded great when it worked. 

Reliability is a high priority to me.  Generally speaking , my failure rate has been super low in the past 40 plus years...   once I have a failure I usually avoid the brand next purchase .  VTL is a great example, except that amp failed three times on me.