But the one in question was an acclaimed audiophile design. What more do I need to say?
Back in the "good old times" when some of my friends were into that audiophile stuff, i had the chance to look in quite a few such "high end" amplifiers. It seems that they are mostly built by a simple set of rules:
1) Either take a ridiculously simple circuit design, or take an excessively complex one.
2) In case of the simple one, reduce it even more, because more parts = more bad bad-sound-sources. In case of the complex one, add more parts because few parts = too simple a thing.
3) Create the actual layout so that it looks very good. Do not care about engineering aspects. It just has to look damn good.
4) Have the boards hand-soldered by 12 year olds. If you can't employ 12 year olds, any old bloke who can't solder properly will do as well. Improvise as much as possible and claim it comes with "built-in tweaks" already.
5) Have someone make an enclosure and knobs that together weighs half a ton. The more weight the better it will sound, they think.
6) Profit!
As a bonus you can sell an audiophile power cable as an extra. Make sure it looks shiny and the price tag is at least half of that of the amplifier. However, if you do that you never ever can tell the customer about the many hundred meters of really, really thin copper wire in the transformers primary.
Greetings,
Chris