pubul57, there were many factors that contributed to David's decision to stop making the ZH-270, which was in high demand and close to 3 years out of production still is, he gets about 2 inquires a day asking for a "last special ZH-270", just one more.
The problems are that there is components that has to be specially made for the ZH, some can only be made by a single specific manufacturer in Europe and then some can only be made by David, these component are only for the ZH and serve no other purpose in anything else in the world, tooling, minimum quantity, inflation cost, parts increases, so if you take into account that a ZH-270 has over a thousand parts, all this adds up quickly.
Dave had bought, what he thought was a lifetime supply of these parts for the ZH-270 but after a production run of 11 years, they ran out, in pricing out a new run of ZH-270's the cost would have made them close to $11K, also the chassis was homely and that needed updating, so his logical step was the Quadrature Z, a no holds barred statement.
Take heart though, there is trickle down technology from the Quadrature Z coming into a new 30 watt Stereo amp, called the ZH-230, new chassis, higher bias (closer to Class A), special new low loss material board, new impedance converter device with a fixed frequency of 500kH vs. 250kH for the Zh-270, lower distortion, higher bandwidth and some other unique abilities, price will be more than what the ZH-270 was but less than what a ZH-270 would have to be.
ZH-2100 100 watt per channel Stereo amp to follow next year.
As always, limited availably.
