I had an email from a dealer in which it says there is an 8% price increase coming. I used to have a Bartok and clock, bought in 2019/20. The clock was £6000 and with recent rise it is now £9450!! and as for the Bartok😳
At this rate, I’m gonna go back to listening to an old transistor radio
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Hate to use the phrase but…first world problem.
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Never preferred the sound of DCS as compared to Naim sources
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Dunc incoming … 
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The way prices are going, not many are going to be able to buy it, so what it sounds like isn’t really going to matter.
It’s gone up so much this year. It’s pushing guys like myself out the market for it. Shame as the new apex gear sounds so good.
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For my sources I settled on Chord
Considerably better for what I like musically than DCS Naim or Linn
I wonder if that’s because chord exclusively use long tap FIR interpolation filters
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Could you explain what that means and how it affects the sound, please?
Roger
Sure, a long tap FIR filter can recover more of the transient information. As you got up the chord range these filters get more complex and expensive and you hear more of the beginning and ending of the note, better bass, better high frequencies, and better instrument separation and just more ease (less fatigue) into listening to the music.
Simply put the kind of filters DCS uses are much more simple and chord makes more effort into recovering the lost information between samples
It does this by looking at the music and looking at what happened before a sample and after a sample (and interpolates the missing data)
The more data it looks at the better the interpolation which is what pay for as you go up the chord range (for example when you pay for the Mscaler)
At the Mscaler level it is looking at 1.4 seconds of music and inserts 15 samples in between each sample of cd format
Digital music is sampled, one does not hear exactly what was recorded (the original analogue waveform) as its chopped into samples. The CD format has 44100 samples per second
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The dacs work very differently, and so do the filters. Basically, it’s mostly about timing and the way filters are used by both is different
DCS Lina the best source I have ever heard - unfortunately I don’t have the means to drop £11k on a half-width box.
Never mind the quality, feel the width? 
Then why say it? In most instances I don’t understand why people do: It is a ridiculous phrase on a hifi forum which by its very existence is a “first world” subject and the vast majority of problems members discuss will be such. Whilst concern about price increases may be less than concerns about, say, non-working equipment, it is still meaningless - and when said in response to someone with a problem with something for which they have paid good money, or a problem with accessing music at best (not the case with this post of yours) it adds to their frustration and annoyance, and could be seen as adding insult to injury.
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The percentage increase on a lot of audio has gone mad recently, I guess it’s a balance between volume of sales v margin of profit and for high end gear I suspect it’s a low volume, high margin mantra.
I understand brands want to monetise their products but an opportunity to dial down margin and do more volume could yield better results.
I like Naim as a company but insane price increases could easily choke me off -power lines are a good example of how prices have increased significantly over time from c£350 to c£650…… surly R&D costs have been recovered and the consumer could get a better deal……
It will be interesting to see how Naim price their new products but I fear the worst.
Gary
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I don’t know about naim, but in the case of dcs there is also the distributor’s profit! I’m not sure what benefit they really bring to an established uk manufacturer selling to a limited number of retailers in the uk market.
It is a very strange world we are heading into right now, and all prices have gone mad for everything.
But what is a bit strange with it all and especially with the high prices. The dealer i use has sold more dCS kit than ever before, lot’s going up to the new vivaldi apex dac like myself also lots traiding in other makes and going for the rossini apex or vivaldi apex.
But with the apex modification also about to go up in price by £1500 this will probably push more people into just trading in, say their rossini and go vivaldi as the gap is getting smaller doing it this way, plus you get a much bigger bang for your buck.
Just strange to see the sale’s increase with all the price increases and really goes against what you would think would be happening.
Because its a free forum and I am entitled to my opinion.
It was not said in response to this, it was said in response to a general comment about price increases as you say, so this last observation is moot.
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Neil’s post is as valid as any others’, this forum has many users with as many perspectives.
I guess government policy is skewed towards the very very wealthy hence for high end products there is still a market that can allow price stretch…… that and the macro global conditions which ironically when solved never see prices fall back to pre macro condition prices!
I think they have decided that Veblen goods is the market segment they are aiming at.
.sjb
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