Yesterday, I was in a Tokyo audio shop where I drop by from time to time. The room had a German Physiks floor-standing pair, The Carbon, on demo. These were priced at over 4.5 Mill yen (40,000 USD) retail but he had them on a demo clearance sale for 1.8 million (15,000 USD), which still didn't make them any more affordable for me, although I have to admit they were very sweet sounding, totally different from how JBLs sound (but I'm not going into this here). Anyway, the manager and I got to start talking about JBL's 60th Anniversary product announcement, advertised in the Stereo Sound magazine, and what he said is that he's heard that the price, in Japan, was going to be around 6 Mill yen (54,000 USD) retail for the pair! He said the new model will be superceding the K2 9800SEs, which retail for 3.2 Mill yen here. This is from a store manager of one of the country's largest audio specialty store, where they have a floor dedicated to JBLs, so I would say the credibility would be high. Although, this information if true would completely price me out of buying a pair when these come out, I am at least glad that JBL will have a product that would finally compete in the ultra high-end market. In the meantime, anybody have any good stock purchase recommendations?
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