Darn it, I was sucked in again and got carried away, losing the point I had intended to make. Of course ARC makes great sounding gear, and deserves all the success and satisfied customers they have earned over the past forty-seven years. And they have indeed stayed at the top of the game by keeping their R & D an ongoing effort. The analogy to automobile development is an apt one, one with which I have no beef. There are a lot of companies that stagnated and eventually died because of a failure to continue to improve its products.
But looking at it from the perspective of a potential purchaser, I keep coming back to example, only one I could cite, of the Atma-Sphere products. If one accepts the premise that the current incarnation of the A-S MP-3 pre-amp and the ARC LS27 (or any other ARC pre-amp of roughly comparable price) are in the same ball park (even if each will be favored by different people), what has the owner of each had to spent in order to now have their quality?
The owner of the MP-3 has spent the cost of the original plus those of the infrequent factory updates. The updates have been relatively minor in nature (and cost), the basic circuit and design remaining the same---it was a "finished", fully realized design and execution.
For the ARC owner, the story is very different. If the current A-S MP-3 is only slightly improved from it's original version, how much better was it at the time of it's introduction in comparison to the same-period ARC? I mean, it has taken all the intervening ARC pre-amps to get to where the A-S MP-3 is now, assuming my premise for the sake of argument. All this time the A-S owner could have been enjoying the sound quality of the MP-3, while the ARC owner has either had to make due with the apparently sub-par sound of his LS-15/16/17/whatever, or send his current pre-amp to ARC for installation of the latest in the frequent updates, or even more costly, sell the old pre-amp and buy the new, completely redesigned model. It appears to me that the changes made to each ARC model---from the LS-16 to the LS-16 Mk.2 for instance, were repeated in every single model. It's as if Rich Larsen had to rediscover everything he learned on the improvements made in the previous model for the next. The ARC circuits keep getting more and more complicated, the circuit boards more cluttered. My EAR pre looks almost empty in comparison.
In the 50's/60's/70/s, American car companies offered completely-redesigned versions of their models every two years or so, while BMW improved their product line incrementally, building on the already "correct" platform of the 3-series, 5-series, and 7-series. I drove my 528e for fifteen years, getting 230,000 miles of driving pleasure out of it. The design and build quality was already fully developed at the time of it's introduction, no need to completely redo it and offer a replacement model two years down the road (no pun intended! :-).
The difference in design approach implies that Ralph Karsten knew way before the ARC team how to achieve a given level of sound quality at a given price. If one had bought an MP-3 twenty-five years ago, he all this time could have enjoyed the sound quality it provides. The ARC customer, in contrast, would only now have that sound quality, in effect investing in the ARC design teams education!
A comparable, though not exact, parallel could be made in the world of loudspeakers. An enthusiast could buy a pair of the original QUAD ESL's in the late 50's, owning them without needing to make any changes to them as other designers endeavored to equal their sound quality in their own designs. It took literally decades for other speakers to appear which equaled any of the QUADS abilities, some of which most other speakers still lack! Peter Walker spent years developing the original QUAD, not releasing it until it was a "finished" design. He spent even longer (almost two decades) getting it's follow-up, the QUAD 63, fully ready for market. That's my kind of designer, and my kind of product. The kicker is that buying this kind of product from this kind of designer and company not only gives you better sound at an earlier moment in time, but is cheaper in the long run---a win win!
