Just stumbled upon this thread. I, too, had a very positive experience working with Tyler at Next Level Hifi. In fact, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that it was by far the best experience I’ve had in my audiophile journey thus far. When you work with Tyler and Joshua, you can be assured that they are, first and foremost, interested in making sure that your needs are taken care of. They take their time to understand your requirements, your current system, etc. and tailor their recommendations based on this. Yes, many dealers do that too. But I felt they just went above and beyond a typical dealer.
They sent me a demo unit of Aavik U-280 to audition in my system in December. Fedex apparently dropped the box somewhere while in transit and the unit arrived with a broken piece. Now get this ... Next Level Hifi did not even wait for me to ship the unit back to them and immediately sent me another unit. They wanted to make sure I wasn’t without music for even a day. But it gets better ...
The deal I made with them was to purchase their demo unit and the price reflected that. Tyler actually shipped me a brand new unit at no extra cost to me. Most dealers would have waited to get the demo unit fixed and perhaps sent it back to the customer. Not these guys! Again, Tyler’s rationale was that he didn’t want me to be without music for more than a day. He just wanted to make sure I had a good experience even if it meant incurring a loss.
After owning many integrated amps in the last 10 years (mostly tube-based), I can say that the Aavik U-280 is by far the best I’ve owned. I was a die hard tube amplification fan boy and always reverted to tubes each time I had the itch to give SS a try. This is the first time I’m not missing tubes.
Next Level Hifi gets my highest recommendation.