While some turntable designs pile on the mass, hoping to tame resonances and better isolate the record from the outside world, Rega has long advocated ultralow-mass designs. What's up with that?
I realize that products such as the darTZeel NHB-468 ($170,000/pair) are for the very few, but the very few include far more people throughout the world than you may realize people who can afford such costly audio products and who do buy them. I know, because in my travels I've met a lot of them, and they deserve to read reviews of products they're considering buyingthings most of us can only dream of owning.
There's no Air Force IV because in East Asia that number is considered bad luckwhich also explains why Japanese golfers shout "Six!" when someone hooks a shot into an adjacent fairway (joke alert).
So, especially with preamplifiers, why not produce a design based on modules that the user can swap in and out, to custom-configure the preamp to that user's current needs while leaving room for later expansion? Why pay for six inputs' worth of stuff when at present you need only two? Upgrades? New features? No problemswap out a module. Or, if a circuit in one module malfunctions, you can send only that module back for repairs, not the whole thing.