No, I've seen a few others with home grown amp modules. There are a lot of good reasons to go that way, including:
1. I'm a bass player, so I expect a certain feel out of an amp. It's the main thing I look for when I try out amps. Unfortunately, since I've tried out a bazillion different amps, I know what an amp CAN feel like, so I'm spoiled. With the newer class D technologies, you can get them extremely small and efficient, but it's difficult to get the feel right, as well as overall performance running wide open. I guess I have preconceived notions of how 300W, 500W, 700W, or 1000W should play and was not quite able to get there when testing oem modules.
2. The low voltage supply output needed for powering preamps and such is a bit anemic on some of the more popular off-the-shelf modules. It would have been impossible to power the preamp in the mM, not counting the back lighting, using one of them, so an extra power supply would have been required.
3. As far as numbers, I can get twice the output power for the same cost as an oem, because there's no middle man to pay.
4. We have dealers in over 180 countries. Some of those countries are important for our business and have...interesting power infrastructure, so we design our products to work with extreme line conditions that some other amps can't handle. The mM can run at like 40vac line, for example. Will it put out full power at that low line level? No, but it's playable.
5. We can actually repair the amp relatively easily without requiring a costly module swap if something goes wrong after the warranty period is over, and we're not depending on an oem maker to still be around 10 years later. For that matter, one could contact us and get schematics. Try to get a schematic from some of the oem's.
