A fascinating discussion - found it by googling the new Pre-8.
Years ago I played (suffered) with the HDP series. Larry made things effortless and was a phenom but at the end of the day I found that this devices is more for people that like to play rather than listen to music. It was simply too complicated to set up, but even after setting it up it suffered from bugs that would remove the romantism from listening to music. Often times it would start to pop, or bug out / crash and so forth. This was an HDP-5.
I, too played with ribbons. Apogee Scintilla and then other open baffle speaker designs (of my own, or 3rd party). I finally gave up once I heard the units were being discontinued and thought maybe I'd give it another go with the newer "beta" units. But from what I'm reading here the issues are there but in a different way. And yeah, the strange random lack in comms from the HQ company didn't help. They would pick and choose when to respond and you really didn't feel supported at times. Somehow whenever I get the bug to go "active", after staring at more amps, more wires and dealing with bugs I get the "let's go back to basics", plug in the stock crossover, less amps and wow the sound is just better. Or maybe it's just more reliable. Forrestc I hope you keep it up and convince me to try it again.
