Our products are a combination of bespoke hardware and software with the realized performance being roughly equal parts of the two. The value proposition of the Rossini is that it occupies a performance range that’s roughly midway between the Bartók and the Vivaldi. If we were to increase the performance of the Bartók with respect to the Rossini then that value proposition wouldn’t be as strong. The fact of the matter is that in order to bump up the performance of the Bartók there will need to be a commensurate increase in the performance of the Rossini as well.
One thing that I need to stress here is that although software has no “hard” costs in terms of components or assembly time it’s still extremely expensive to develop. You guys would be amazed at the amount of money that was spent in terms of developer pay in order to develop Rossini 2.0, Mosaic, or even the MQA implementation. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of £ and all of that has been delivered to our customers at no additional cost. Although no hardware changed Rossini 2.0 should be thought of as a completely different product than 1.x. The differences in performance are that great.
Bartók is a new product and it will see performance enhancements through software when the timing is appropriate.
This gave me a good chuckle. Thank you for that…
The fact of the matter is that Bartók in its current form is extremely close to Rossini 1.x in terms of measured and subjective performance. Rossini 1.x received absolutely stellar reviews and not one of those could have ever been inferred to be “lukewarm.”
In terms of a comparison of Bartók to Rossini 2.0 (i.e. the Audiophile Style review), while I may not have chosen the words used I would agree with the assessment. Rossini 2.0 has a lot more texture and “meat” when compared to Bartók and it should. It’s considerably more expensive.