So I'm the original owner of the Sutherland KC Vibe MK2 that was sent to Amir for testing. I owned a couple of other phono preamps from Pro-ject before I discovered Sutherland products. I liked how the Sutherlands looked (especially inside), that they were made domestically, and that Ron himself was an engineer that seemed to care a great deal about his products. I also read from other customers that he's always willing to personally help with any issues. Sutherland products are expensive but I felt okay trying the entry level KC Vibe for the above reasons.
The KC Vibe sounded good to my ears with my turntable setup, felt sturdy, and was easy to setup but I just HAD to know how it measured. Ha, ha. I expected the KC Vibe to measure "well" across all tests at the very least considering it cost almost $1000 with tax. Alas, I was disappointed with the poor headroom Amir reported and I was a little embarrassed about how much money I spent on a product I felt
should measure great. So I decided to then buy a Mani 2 phono preamp from Schiit since it measured well on ASR and was a quarter of the price of the KC Vibe. And guess what, the Mani 2 sounded good too, was easy to setup, and it's now my current phono preamp. I decided to sell the Sutherland out of principle that another domestic company could make a similar product at the quarter of the price and also measure similarly, if not better.
To be clear, I don't have any negative feelings towards Sutherland and I'm truly curious about his other products and how they sound and measure. I just don't have thousands of dollars to find out and I don't think I can make another $1000 purchase without any objective measurements beforehand. I feel it's fair to expect good measuring audio equipment at a certain price point but I know there are plenty of people that spend a lot more for various reasons like aesthetics, name brand, particular sound signatures, etc. Anyways, I thought I share my feelings about this particular product with those that are on the fence about buying this.
Speaking of phono preamps, I feel like there are quite a few on the market that I would love Amir to test like the recently released Phono Box S3 B. It's balanced and has a pretty cool feature of being able to be hooked up to two separate turntables at the same time; balanced and unbalanced inputs with front switch. It retails at $500 though but I am curious on how it measures... I guess I just don't learn.