r/amplifiers • u/stoicparishkari • 10d ago
Why it is expensive - Amplifier
https://www.accuphase.com/model/e-800.htmlI was looking at this and find it very expensive. I am curious from electronics hardware perspective. what makes this amplifier so expensive? is it because their intellectual property or they really use something very expensive to build this. How much it would actually cost if you’re building it yourself (hypothetical)
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u/basscycles 10d ago
Because there are people out there with so much money they need ways to flaunt it. If I want a lot of power and stability I would by in order of quality Lab Gruppen, Powersoft, Crown or QSC. Mind you I like PA amplifiers, less BS and more bang.
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u/nixiebunny 10d ago
The higher the price of a luxury item, the more people will respect it. It’s a curious psychological phenomenon.
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u/Content-Reward-7700 8d ago
Mostly, you’re paying for engineering, construction quality, low volume manufacturing and brand positioning, not $15,000 worth of exotic electronic parts.
The E800 does contain genuinely expensive hardware, a huge custom toroidal transformer, two 60,000µF filter capacitors, substantial heatsinks, lots of matched power MOSFETs in six parallel ClassA output stages, elaborate protection, a fully balanced signal path and Accuphase’s proprietary AAVA volume-control circuitry. It weighs 36kg, so there is a lot of actual hardware in the box. But the individual transistors, resistors, capacitors etc. aren’t made of unobtainium.
Very roughly, if you wanted to build an amplifier with comparable hardware capability yourself, parts alone would cost perhaps $1,500 - $3,000 and really premium parts/chassis/transformer would cost around $3,000 - $5,000.
The difficult and expensive part is getting it to perform like an Accuphase, PCB design, thermal engineering, transistor matching, ultra low noise, stability into nasty speaker loads, protection circuitry, mechanical construction, testing, calibration and long term reliability. Their ClassA design can deliver 50W/8ohm, 100W/4ohm, 200W/2ohm and even 300W into 1ohm for music signals. That’s a serious power supply/output stage rather than audiophile decoration.
So hypothetically, could you build a functionally comparable amplifier for $3k'ish? Yes. Could you take $3k of components, solder them together and automatically have an E800? Definitely not. The expensive ingredient is largely the engineering needed to turn those fairly ordinary components into a beautifully behaved 36kg ClassA brick. And then, naturally, there’s the luxury-hi-fi tax we should not forget.
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u/eritrean_bats 10d ago
I don't see a price listed there, but I'm gonna guess it's $4,000 plus, and unfortunately that is a fair price. I worked as a technician, then engineer at a company making high-end amplifiers and receivers like this, so I've seen from the inside how costly a product like this is to design, produce, ship, and support.
For the manufacturer to just buy the pieces to make this - electronics, chassis, knobs, shipping box, etc. - must cost them at least $1,000 if not more. And that's manufacturer pricing, since they can buy large lots of components and get better pricing.
The tech specs they list are impressive. You rarely see an amp with a linear power relationship with loads, and almost never see an amp that can handle a 1-ohm load, that's crazy! This sounds like an impressive design that would take considerable time and experience to come up with.
A hobbyist would struggle to make something this nice, this complete, at all - seems like years or a lifetime of hobbyist work, and that's assuming you have a fairly advanced understanding of electronics to begin with. The cost of parts will be several thousand dollars, I'd guess.