Hi Guys,
The answer to your "...boost the headphone..." question is that, no, it's not possible to do this on the Comet. Honestly, we expected minimal use of the headphone output and so it's not so much that it was an afterthought as it was a conscious decision to do it the way we did. We expected the "95% Use Case" would be a customer listening to music through speakers and when the family went to bed, they'd plug in headphones to hear the last few tracks before they went off to bed, too. We were simply caught off guard by how many users were primarily headphone listeners. But, live and learn, we won't make that assumption again and anything else we build will get the same level of performance for the headphone as the other outputs.
Also, I saw a comment earlier regarding the cost of products in this market. It's really true that by the time it reaches the end consumer, each $1 of cost to the manufacturer becomes $5 at retail. The reason that happens is that the business has some overhead, the distributor has to get paid, and the dealer has to get paid. And hopefully there's some profit for each of those people as well. What happens when manufacturers sell direct is they are cutting out the distributors and / or dealers because they can't afford to pay these channel costs and it's the only way the manufacturer can make any money. If a dealer offers you a discount to make a sale, they're usually making a conscious decision to eat cat food for dinner instead of a tuna sandwich. They have tough businesses to run.
When we make offers like this, we can afford to do it because we built our business so we can afford to pay the channel costs. The reason is that our products are 95% built by robots. Humans don't touch them until we do final assembly and test. We did it this way because ultimately, this hobby won't really survive if the dealers die. (So at least buy a cable or something from them once in a while!) We wanted to build a product that dealers can sell profitably, even if they end up offering a discount.
When we make an offer like this, it's a Marketing expense for us. Even if you hadn't asked, we would (will) send Larry a cash "finder's fee" for each unit. We'd like him to become a dealer but he's under no obligation to do so. In addition, when we ship a unit to one of the forum members, we will also send a commission check to the dealer nearest that member (or one of their choice) in an attempt to get them to become a dealer if they aren't already. We don't want to be one of those companies that looks to screw the dealers - we want to be the one who helps them survive.
So if anyone is interested, contact us at sales@exogal.com and we'll take it off-line. Put "Audiogon713" in the subject line so we know it's one of you. (Don't worry, you'll all get the same deal!) But even if you don't take advantage of our deal, make sure you patronize your dealers once in a while!
Jeff
