Wayne Parham Messages: 18758 Registered: January 2001
Illuminati (33rd Degree)
Wow! I consider Bob Brines to be a friend, or at least a very close audio aquaintance and kindred spirit. He has attended almost every GPAF and LSAF show and I saw him there every year. In fact, I just saw him a couple months ago at LSAF 2017. So I'm surprised he didn't say anything!
Then again, I do understand how he feels. When the drivers chosen for a design are coming close to the end of production, it can be very difficult to find suitable replacements. A good loudspeaker design requires dozens and sometimes hundreds of man-hours of development time.
Beyond that, there's the months and years you have to "live with a design" to see it to maturity, and sometimes you find a few little tweaks desirable during this phase in the design life-cycle. So a mature loudspeaker design is really kind of a big deal. It's not easy to start over when you know how long the haul is to get that back.
When you want that kind of quality in a loudspeaker design, it's not something you can just "dial-in" overnight.