The shiny metal plates must made of 10mm thick solid gold.
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Well at least that is a much better picture, you'd think they'd have submitted something better to the magazines. They have 2 amps, neither has ever been sold as far as I know, they were just for prestige. Magazine fodder. Pretty sure it is just polished brass on the outside, and solid copper bus bars (no wires) on the inside. Maybe its worth $50k, who knows. Not $500k+, cmon.
Now if you want to talk about insanity, look at Gateway Mastering in Portland, ME. Bob Ludwig is one of the best audio engineers in the world and masters audio for some of the biggest bands and movies.
Custom made Eggleston speakers designed to his specs, ~800lbs each. They now sell similar (but not exact) speakers for $167,000 to the "general public" by special order. I think that is per speaker.
Each sits on concrete pillars that go all the way down to bedrock (well, don't have to go far to hit bedrock in Maine) to eliminate any vibration and resonance, and there is sound deadening between the pillars and the floor for total isolation.
Speakers are on sharp spikes to minimize the contact with that already non-resonant concrete
Whole floor is floating on top of sound deadening material, walls are sound deadened and angled to prevent standing waves and focus the sound toward the booth.
Amps (2 stacks Cello MK II amps, I think 6 or 8 at 4000 watts each) are behind inch thick bulletproof glass to keep them as close as possible to the speakers but silence the fan noise and electronics hum
Whole studio runs off battery power into their own AC inverters to isolate from crappy grid AC power interference.
Then his board is an old school classic, relatively low tech, I believe with tube preamps (again, I do believe in tubes in the preamp stage). I believe he finally had it overhauled 5 or 10 years ago with some more modern visuals (replaced the analog meters) to account for having to master for digital music that was going to be compressed and had to have more control over peaks and normalization, but it is still pretty no frills compared to what you'll see at most places.
He says you can put your ears up to the tweeters when they are at full volume with no input and they are completely silent as if everything is powered off.
And you know what, for the million+ he spent on that one room, it probably sounds like a million dollars. I'd trust a renowned audio engineer over some magazine fanboy any day of the week.
He added the smaller 3rd Eggleston in the middle (plus more in the back) and more amps and TV for doing surround sound stuff but that's not the bread and butter, stereo is. Would love to spend a day there listening to some good uncompressed master audio.
OK maybe getting a bit off topic......
