I have an older (very much older) MP1 that I purchased used and in virtually non-functional condition. Therefore after purchase I was forced into DIY mode, both to fix it and to update it to what were then Mk II specs. This took more than a year's worth of my spare hours. Ralph and his group at Atma-sphere was a great help in this endeavor. (At the time, I owned an MFA Luminescence, as a user til the MP1 was "finished".) This all happened about 5-6 years ago. Then as of last year, and after a great deal of study and brain-picking, I took my MP1 into the great unknown, making several more mods that are similar to the Mk III version but also reconfiguring the phono and linestage circuits in ways that could not really be done in a production unit (e.g., using battery bias in the phono input stage and in the circlotron output stage). The results are fabulously good; the phono is by far the best I have ever heard in my system and with tons of gain for any LOMC. I'd love to compare it to an Aesthetix or Manley (or Raul's phonolinepreamp), to see where I'm at with it. Vinyl now so blows away CDs that I really don't bother with listening to the latter. If anyone with any of these or other top drawer units resides near to me in the Washington, DC, area, perhaps we can have some fun comparing preamps.