08-21-08: Jimmy3993
More conversation with nuforce. They gave me directions to open the pre and
move a jumper to cut the gain by 1/2. So I gave it a shot but when I opened it
up it didnt really look like he picture. Turns out that the demo version i was
sent has an old board without the jumper.
I was going stay quiet on this, but your news above changed my mind.
How can a company send out a demo unit that is not current with the latest
production version? What if you had decided you really liked the preamp, and
you wanted to purchase it? Would NuForce have notified you that the demo
unit wasn't up to current spec and sent you a new one? I doubt it. Sounds like
they weren't aware that the unit you had wasn't a model with the most recent
board.
From the outset, NuForce seems to have been a company that uses their
customers as paying beta testers. During the course of two or three years,
they would release new version after new version of their amps within months
of the previous models, which were touted as the greatest thing
in hifi. One would buy their product, and then two months later the amp
would have to be shipped back to NuForce for the latest upgrades. A few
months after that, the process would repeat. This only stopped with the
release of their Ref 9 V2SE, which I demoed and thought was an excellent
amplifier if paired with appropriate speakers. However, based on your preamp
experience it sounds to me like NuForce still doesn't quite have its act
together with the preamp.
I think if you want a product for the long term, that has been tested and
refined BEFORE it was brought to market, and if you want to avoid being a
beta tester for a product for which you have paid a good sum of money, then
you would be well advised to look at a different brand.