Yes, over engineered. Calling such products a "state of the art" and providing a clever marketing to make people buy them is totally wrong...
Engineering is not about about designing a product with the best possible specs, it is about designing a cheapest product which meets the reasonably defined specs.
Totally wrong? Totally? Categorically unethical to call the best product out there SOA? Better to call it 'over engineered'? I don't know. That sounds like part of the 'everyone is a winner' line of thinking that I mentioned. Again, I'm more a 'best is the enemy of the good' kind of guy.
I did not know that calling something SOA 'makes' people buy things. I am happy to be corrected on this, but it seems to me that people buy a lot of stuff that I'd never consider SOA. Only average, or even less. I think a lot of people buy things based on brand recognition. Or a sexy girl in an advertisement. In audio, people often buy things because of something they've read in a magazine, or maybe it was something they were told by an audio store sales jockey. A lot of the goofy high priced audio gear is certainly not hawked as SOA, but rather because of 'magical' properties.
I think our disagreement boils down to the simple fact that you and I have a different idea of what constitutes the concept, SOA. I don't reduce it to marketing.
What you next define as 'engineering' is really an exercise in product development, sales and marketing. I'll tell you how it works. The engineering team meets with a marketing and manufacturing team, and are told a set of goals and price points. They are often given a parts bin to work with, and tasked to design a product within certain parameters. Yes. That is an example of a kind of engineering. But it is not engineering to SOA specs. State of the art is designing the best that can be produced. Period.
My guess is that if you go to a company like Sony, the former situation is what you get. If you go to a company like Benchmark, or Matrix, you get a group of engineers whose first goal is designing the best product they can build and sell. Period. In the final analysis you have to choose what's important to you. Is the Matrix better than a DAC 3 HGC? Well you do get streaming, but no preamp. It costs a thousand dollars more. Can you reliably tell a sonic difference between either the Matrix or Benchmark, and, say, a Cambridge Audio DAC Magic Plus in a DBT? Probably not. But, again, you don't get streaming with one, or a preamp in the other. But you can save $1500 to $2500 with the latter. However it is, I'd never call a DACmagic Plus SOA. It's pretty good, maybe even excellent, for its price point.
Finally, as good as the Matrix measures, it evidently has some ergonomic problems--problems described in the review. So when I say it is SOA, I'm just talking about what the company has done with the DAC implementation. That is all.
PS: I don't like to give advice, but since you brought up tires, I'd advise everyone to buy the best tires they can afford. Be careful of super low profile tires, though, unless you drive a sports car, or live in Michigan and like bent rims.
