My advice is to choose your seperates wisely. There's been a fair share of seperates companies who've either fallen off of the map or gone away completely.

Another point that I've made before is that it's awfully hard for the small esoteric companies to compete against the technology giants in the software area. The amps are fine, the pre/processors are a different matter.

Personally, I've been burned one too many times by seperates companies (ones with big names too) to invest anything into selling them anymore.

I'm looking forward to someone proving me wrong. I'd dearly love to get back into the seperates business.