Re: marshall petition 2
Jim is actually very much involved with things at Marshall still, although his daughter has been doing more and more these days. He's no spring chicken ya know.
He does still go to the amps shows and such and is quite approachable.
The cost of Marshalls here versus England is quite understandable. The freight charges to get them from there to here is not cheap. Then once they get here, they have to go through the U.S. distributor and then (you guessed it) get shipped out to the stores via GROUND transportation. They have to recoup the costs somehow, and those costs don't just go to Marshall, but the distributor that sent them to the store. Oh yeah, can't forget wages too.
I have faith that they got their act together with the Vintage Modern and JVM. The VM is a great sounding amp, IMO. Haven't tried the JVM yet. Their target market is different nowadays versus 15-20 years ago.
There's nothing wrong with PCB amps as long as the PCB is of high enough quality (e.g. Mesa Boogie). There is absolutely no difference between a circuit that is PCB and the same circuit done PTP other than the tolerances between of the parts. There's still signal flowing from point A to point B.
Sure, there are PTP amps (clones and whatnot) out there that cost less, but they are mostly 1 or 2 person operations who don't have a huge overhead nor ship overseas. They just have to worry about recouping the cost of the parts and charge for their time. Then there are kits, which don't include the labor involved with putting it all together.
I'm not trying to be a smartass here, just pointing out the simple things that get missed in these discussions. Basic economics.
