Not CJ, but not common either

[AnotherJohnson]

I’ve never seen a pair of these current model amps come up for sale. Limited run of 10 pair. 36 KT150s. They’ve got to go to a collector. 750 Wpc luxurious tube power. 850 Wpc at clipping. Probably enough to drive the truck that delivers your Maggie’s.

https://tmraudio.com/components/power-a ... tion-pair/

[admin]

Wow, that's a monster of an amp. The cost of retubing it as much as many high end amps cost alone.

[AnotherJohnson]

ARC is mighty proud of their tubes, probably rightly so. They screen them by careful matching, and they burn them in for a couple of days before final testing.

People complain about how much it costs to have ARC retube their stuff and, like I have done, they go to Upscale to save some money on what they hope will be equally good tubes.

As I’ve been researching it though, I’m shifting toward using ARC as my tube source going forward with ARC gear. My guesstimate is that to retube those REF 750 SELs would cost the best part of $10k if the tubes were obtained through ARC. Certainly that’s a lot.

But if you’ve bought $75k msrp amps, do you really want to listen to them with tubes that may be less than what ARC would have installed?

People want everything to be cheap or free. But you can’t have good stuff if the good company that makes the good stuff goes out of business because few people are willing to pay what it actually costs to produce the good stuff.

When I met Trent Suggs at that party a few weeks ago, I was impressed. He struck me as another man of faith … a man who was thoughtful and trying to guide the company by right principles. He has a pretty large payroll at ARC. It is important to have the cash flow to support the payroll. We did not talk about this, but it’s true nevertheless.

Just as I made a commitment to CJ and most recently paid $120 each for three 6922 equivalents, I’m going to support ARC as well as I can.