I guess I will be the old guy on the porch...
I have heard many of the Spectral items at CES and in a couple Audio Stores. The audio quality of the equipment is easily in my top 3 as well as the sonics. One of the shops I visited in Miami was the local hang out for they Spectral folks and I even met Dr.Keith there a couple times. If you ever had a chance to converse with these guys you would understand why they build their products.
They really don't make any money doing it because about 75% of the cost of the product is in the parts, pieces and manufacturing. The dealers don't make a ton either because the profit margin is minimal (10-15%) compared to other audiophile stuff. Hence they only have a handful of folks that sell the products for them.
I will bet that most of the problems people have with Spectral equipment is using interconnects that do not have the proper filtration and feedback inhibitors. Everything they build has frequency response way above most other equipment like up into the Radar range. That is why they recommend MIT cabling; as many of the cables were designed exclusively for their equipment.
I buy ton's of used MIT online for 1/10 of the original retail and it sounds great with most equipment.
Does anybody beat up Levinson for using Lemo-Camc connectors that cost $100ea?
I do own a couple of their amps and they sound great. I use a David Berning pre-amp he custom built for my listening operations. It took two years to get it but what would you expect for a built from scratch piece of gear. Same goes for the Spectral stuff.
As far as specifying what cabling to use, would you run pump gas in your Testarossa? I have a couple vehicles and bikes that I only run Drum VP Fuels in. I can't afford detonation of a $100K engine to save a couple bucks a gallon on cheap pump gas.
My favorite quote of all time comes from Hirotake Arai, "$50 Head; $50 Helmet", not an exact quote but I'm sure you get the picture.
If you are a serious person, it is easy to get replacement parts and repair help for any piece of audio equipment out there. The internet won't usually find these folks as they don't want to be bothered by every dumba$$ that wants something fixed for minimum wage pricing. You call a dealer and find out if they will send it to their fixer. It may not be as cheap as taking it down to Circuit City and having the Geek Squad fix it but it will be repaired to the standard by which it was built.
All of this is just my humble opinion after 50 years of loving Music and trying to get it to play back in a real way.
Mark in GA