While some (many? most?) ARC owners never have a problem with any of their products, their designs are well known to have a couple of design weaknesses, at least in terms of product reliability:
1- ARC doesn’t fuse the output tubes in their power amps (they maintain fuses degrade sound quality), instead using sacrificial resistors and related electronic components to protect the rest of the amplifier when a tube implodes. When that happens, the owner has to not only replace the tube, but repair the amp. That cost can add up. They also install those tubes into tube sockets mounted on circuit boards rather than the amp’s metal chassis. Brooks Berdan always had a lot of traded-in ARC power amps in his used racks, all with scorched circuit boards. Those trade-ins were replaced with products from the amplifier companies Brooks chose to sell: VTL, Jadis, and Music Reference. Brooks himself also owned an Atma-Sphere amp or two.
2- ARC uses electronic parts under-rated for the voltages they see. When I turned on my new SP-3, the incoming voltage rush immediately blew the first resistor in the circuit. Roger Modjeski repaired a lot of ARC pieces when he started in the electronic repair field while still in high school (Bill Johnson owned and operated a repair shop before starting his first company---Electronic Industries, which he first sold then bought back from Peploe), so when he started designing and building his Music Reference electronics he intentionally used parts rated at ten times the voltages the parts would ever see. Because of that practice---as well as the inherent stability of Roger’s circuits---MR products are renown for their unusually high reliability. Do they sound as good as those of ARC? That’s up to you to decide.
The Music Reference RM-200 power amp has been Michael Fremer’s reference "budget" priced (of course Mike’s definition of "budget" differs from many of ours ;-) tube amp for a quarter century. In that time frame, how many ARC New! Improved! designs have ARC aficionados seen come and go? In that quarter century the RM-200 underwent only one design change---to Mk.2 status. No constant product introduction/SE revision/model replacement merry-go-round for Music Reference. Just buy them (I just last night snapped up an RM-5 Mk.IV pre-amp. Okay, IT was revised a number of times ;-), install them in your system, sit back and listen to the music, and be happy.
Ralph Karsten at Atma-Sphere, rather than constantly replacing models with new ones every coupla years, keeps his designs available for a looonnng time, offering updates---instead of new models---every few years. His MP-1 and MP-3 pre-amps have been in production for over 30 years! In those 30 years, how many ARC pre-amps have been introduced, improved, then discontinued and replaced? Karsten incrementally improves each model---offering updates at moderate cost, resulting in greater long-term value for the owners of his gear. That’s the approach I prefer. And you?
