I listened to BAT vk p10 versus an Aesthetix at the Analog Room in San Jose. (I own an Aesthetix Io) I thought it sounded better in every way. The Aesthetix design is very full out attack on making the best phono source and it's complex (many tubes and parts) design with regulation at every stage. A solid point for the stability of the design is that it hasn't been rev'd often. Lots of rev's show an unstable design or greedy manufacturers. The sound is fantastic, but plain physics involved with having more parts = more failures. BTW: I have only re-place a couple of noisey tubes and some fuses (because I'm using two PS and KT-66s -thanks Albert) in three years. Better reliability than I might have expected actually, but not for the timid.
