• I chatted with Tom Evans to get his side of the story:

The phono stage Input failed for reasons that aren’t clear. (Tom’s gear is famously reliable so it could have been that it was wrongly connected, electrical surge, Lightning strike)?

The faulty phono stage was returned to Tom Evans for inspection, to assess if it was a warranty repair or not.

   Instead of carefully packing the phono stage In the sturdy plywood box, that it came In. The very expensive phono stage was loosely packed in a cheap cardboard box!! It arrived at Tom’s workshop in the condition that you see in the video, having been badly damaged in the post!

   Some of the Internal framework, machined metal corner columns, and sections of the acrylic casework were damaged beyond repair. These would have needed to be ordered, by Tom Evans, from the companies that make these parts.

 Tom quoted the owner of the faulty phono stage for Inspecting and repairing the circuit and rebuilding the damaged casework. (not nearly as much as some 'you tubers suggested).

Tom says he quoted him the actual repair cost without adding any margin.

The owner baulked at the quote and sent the damaged phono stage to ‘Mend It Mark’ Instead, for a ‘free’ fix.

  Mark made a big display of ‘back engineering’ the SR, but without the proprietary IC details, he must have known that this was an exercise in futility? (Tom complained to You Tube about Mark trying to copy and printing out copies of proprietary circuit details. 

  'Mend It Mark' allegedly replaced a faulty capacitor but couldn’t replace the out-of-spec ICs and so the phono stage only worked for one week before failing again!

As for ‘repairing’ the case work! Did you see the gaps and cracks in his ‘repaired’ casework? 

Honestly, a 6 year old could have done better. So the phono stage is still faulty,

The casework is still a mess and It would seem that Tom’s gear has now been maligned by someone

desperate to be ‘liked’ on his you tube channel, into the bargain!

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  Some background on the Inner workings of the phono stage is In order:

A well known electronics 'giant' uses one of Tom Evan's patents under a licensing agreement.

Tom Evans gains exclusive access to some of the 'giants' very sophisticated chip sets (long story) and uses them In his gear (under license). The IC’s labels are removed to protect the ID of the company and Tom is forbidden from disclosing any details. Scrubbing the identity of the ICs also makes copying his circuits a lot harder.

  Tom says he pays about NZ $10,000 per minimum order of 1000 ICs which are ‘specially selected’ from batches of thousands and individually laser-trimmed.

 Even so, Tom says he's lucky to get 40 usable ICs, out of each batch of 1000, for use in his SRX and Mastergroove phono stages. (If you’re electronically minded, he’s looking for a 0.000 mV input offset, after a 30mins warm up time)!!! Almost unheard of.

  Tom reckons that you can't run paralleled ICs, in this application, (without using 'nasty' coupling caps) that aren't exactly matched to 3 decimal places! and he should know.

  His staff have to test and match all the ICs individually to pick out the few that are usable.

This takes two or three days and is another additional cost.

The SR in the video has 4 ICs per channel, so 8 in total. So If he effectively pays NZ$ 10,000 for around

40 usable ICs , then there's NZ$ 2000 worth of ICs in one SR!

   These are some of the ICs that ‘Bend It Mark’ couldn’t identify or replace and that Tom wouldn’t, and couldn’t sell him.

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Some of the points raised in the video...

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• Tom Evans charges 25,000 pounds?

The shipping, import costs/taxes/GST, distributer and retail margins account for the bulk of the final retail price. That’s the same for almost any item that you buy, be It a new car, TV, appliance, etc.

‘Mend It Mark’ must surely know that the manufacturer only gets a percentage of the retail price.

Is he being deliberately malicious or Is he really that Ignorant?

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• Intellectual Property Rights

A few 'you tubers'? who reposted the very misleading video, seem to have a problem with this?

The whole idea of patents and Intellectual property rights is to try and protect Inventors/makers from copycats. If Tom, in breach of contract, published all his designs with details of circuits and ICs.

How long would it be before his gear was being copied by other companies and he went out of business?

Mend It Mark, trying to back engineer Tom’s design, is simply paving the way for rip offs.

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Copy cats and Fakes

  You can buy cheaper copies of various Hi Fi components, on line.

Look at Douk for example. They’ll sell you a copycat chasis and other sites will sell you copycat circuits for your Imitation gear.

  Why don’t, say, Rolex make all their designs and parts available to anyone who wants to ‘repair’ one of their watches? Because they have enough problems with rip offs and fakes as it is.

Why would they help fakers to make better copies?

 

• Only worth $200 ?

This is laughable for all the reasons above. You simply can’t compare a Mastergroove SR or Groove SRX to less expensive phono stages.

Tom Evans’ many fans and owners agree that his gear is exceptional and many reviewers too!

Music lovers who’ve compared Tom’s phono stages, to others, often end up as his very happy customers.

Tom Evans has previously undertaken contract work for Pioneer and Michell Audio, amongst others.

These are reputable companies that don’t employ charlatans.

  If his gear isn’t worth what he’s asking, then why is he still in business, after nearly 40 years?

He must be doing something right?

 

•  So how does a small company, with limited resources, defend themselves against false accusations, made against them, on line, by persons with ‘ulterior’ motives?

Having spent decades building up a loyal client base only to have mud slung at them for

the sake of making, sensationalist, videos to try and attract viewers?

That’s a headache for Tom Evans to sort out!