I think the face plate of my P9’s power supply is plastic but it’s not worried me.
It's not the use of plastic in itself that bothers my, it's the
way they use it at times.
Don't get me wrong, they've done so many brilliant things, including clever use of plastics, but some of the stylistic and ergonomic choices baffle me. There often seems to be little coherence and consistency to their design. As if no one at the factory has the job of overseeing what the products look like. It goes right back to the early days when they used different colours for their logo. You'd see Planars with red, green, white, black logos on them. They seem to have settled on red but you still get red logos on the boxes and white on the decks. Personally, I would've got with the green.
Then you've got multiple styles of product within the same product range. You bought an Aria phono stage to go with your Elicit amp and they don't match. And the second incarnation of the Aria/Brio, who passed that?? Cheap set-top box was a perfect description. It's bad enough that an £800 phono stage has a plastic fascia but ok, we get the keeping costs down philosophy but damn, did it need to look
that plasticy?
Little details like the fact that the buttons on the Aria, DAC etc are not in line horizontally, or equidistant actually. Or the tight loading aperture on the Saturn-R/Apollo-R with unnecessarily small finger indents on the disk tray, which are going to make these machines extremely difficult if not impossible for someone with large hands or limited dexterity to use.
Like I said, don't get me wrong, still my favorite Hi-Fi company. Nobody's perfect and the great stuff they do vastly outweighs the bad but they really could do with employing someone who knows about this stuff who can say 'Listen guys, that looks crap. That is hard to use.' etc. Fair enough if a compromise has been used to keep the cost down but it's frustrating when a poor choice looks completely unnecessary.