If you suspect that the m920 is overpriced, I'd like to chime in with a little bit about what it takes to build one. They are built by hand, by a small crew of dedicated, if not slightly overworked folks here that are our friends and family. We all drive to work in used cars with sack lunches and spend our days together in a metal building on the outskirts of a small town in northern Colorado. There is not an executive among us, and with the exception of maybe a canoe or something, nobody owns a boat. This whole endeavor called Grace Design is quite literally, a labor of love, borne out of our lifelong obsession with creating really cool, really well built musical recording and playback equipment.
We use the best possible components available, from the custom would toroidal power transformers, to the chassis bits fabricated from stainless steel and machined aluminum, to every single passive component – capacitors, resistors etc, everything that is crammed into the m920 is painstakingly selected for either its particular sonic quality, reliability or both.
The m920 is the 4th iteration in a lineage of products that we started working on in the late 90's, with every update bringing us together to carefully assess the current state of analog and digital audio design and how it might fit into our design work. From early on, these products have been adapted by audio professionals for critical listening duties. For example – every album that gets mastered at Gateway Mastering, gets its final QC done by a someone listening to it on headphones through one of these, making sure there isn't some low level eq or editing error missed by the mastering engineer. This is because it reveals everything in the recording. Everything.
Judging a piece of equipment based solely on a component number or two is missing the point all together. The magic here is about people – our designers and their many, many decades of collective electronic and audio engineering experience. Its not about just picking a certain part number, thats just the starting point. What makes the difference is the million or so educated, complicated, interrelated design decisions that go into applying it properly that results in a successful piece of gear. And the same can be said for measured specifications. Of course we require that our stuff measures well on the bench, but the real test is what happens when you listen to it. Does the music come through to your brain and into your heart? Do you experience the intent of the artist? Do you stop listening to the gear and start listening to the music?
You can also measure the quality of a product's design by looking at the manufacturer's warranty. The m920 is covered by a 5 year transferable warranty. We would not be able to offer that if we didn't know unequivocally that 99.9% of them that leave our shop will not come back for repair.
The m920 will go head to head with Audiophile equipment that is 4x its price. We are a Pro Audio company, and we operate on Pro Audio industry margins, which are markedly smaller compared to Audiophile industry margins. If you think its only worth $599, then respectfully you simply do not understand it. Truthfully, if we let an accountant do a deep cost analysis of what it costs us to design and build the m920 vs. what you what you can buy it for on here, they would laugh us out of their office.
We use the best possible components available, from the custom would toroidal power transformers, to the chassis bits fabricated from stainless steel and machined aluminum, to every single passive component – capacitors, resistors etc, everything that is crammed into the m920 is painstakingly selected for either its particular sonic quality, reliability or both.
The m920 is the 4th iteration in a lineage of products that we started working on in the late 90's, with every update bringing us together to carefully assess the current state of analog and digital audio design and how it might fit into our design work. From early on, these products have been adapted by audio professionals for critical listening duties. For example – every album that gets mastered at Gateway Mastering, gets its final QC done by a someone listening to it on headphones through one of these, making sure there isn't some low level eq or editing error missed by the mastering engineer. This is because it reveals everything in the recording. Everything. Judging a piece of equipment based solely on a component number or two is missing the point all together. The magic here is about people – our designers and their many, many decades of collective electronic and audio engineering experience. Its not about just picking a certain part number, thats just the starting point. What makes the difference is the million or so educated, complicated, interrelated design decisions that go into applying it properly that results in a successful piece of gear. And the same can be said for measured specifications. Of course we require that our stuff measures well on the bench, but the real test is what happens when you listen to it. Does the music come through to your brain and into your heart? Do you experience the intent of the artist? Do you stop listening to the gear and start listening to the music? You can also measure the quality of a product's design by looking at the manufacturer's warranty. The m920 is covered by a 5 year transferable warranty. We would not be able to offer that if we didn't know unequivocally that 99.9% of them that leave our shop will not come back for repair. The m920 will go head to head with Audiophile equipment that is 4x its price. We are a Pro Audio company, and we operate on Pro Audio industry margins, which are markedly smaller compared to Audiophile industry margins. If you think its only worth $599, then respectfully you simply do not understand it. Truthfully, if we let an accountant do a deep cost analysis of what it costs us to design and build the m920 vs. what you what you can buy it for on here, they would laugh us out of their office.