Audio Research in Receivership.

@fsonicsmith1 Going all- in with KT150’s was a mistake? IMO, this tube is pretty superior sounding ( depending on the circuit) to the older KT88’s, 6550’s and even the KT120’s. ARC was always looking for the way forward, which meant going to the latest tubes and designing around them.

OTOH, if ARC are continuing to have reliability issues, ( I was unaware of this), then that would indeed be an area of concern.

@fsonicsmith1  while I agree that buying reliable KT 150’s can be a chore, there are some vendors who do sell them and they seem fine. I have had luck with Upscale audio, among others. Buying on eBay is not advised.

Hopefully, this is a Chapter 11 ( re-organization) vs. Chapter 7 ( full liquidation and closure). However, it certainly looks like the latter. Apparently there is a long list of un-paid creditors!

With some luck, I am hoping that another entity will step in and keep them afloat..and alive. This company has made some truly excellent products over the years. Very sad to hear about their travails.

Looking at the creditor list, like many on this forum, I know several of these people/companies. Some come as a surprise, some not so much. Nonetheless, the one’s that come as a surprise to me are not one’s that most would think would ever be a creditor of ARC.

Since the market for high end gear is world wide, and not just limited to a certain demographic and location, that would seem to be what has been holding up the industry. 

However, ARC has some serious competition due to this world wide market, more so than ever before in the past. When ARC was in their heyday ( which IMO was in the mid 80's to the late 90's), they had the US market far more to themselves than today, and they had a decent exposure in Europe as well. This situation applies to many other well known high end US audio companies today, which makes me question who is going down next, unfortunately. It would seem that many of these US companies have been heavily relying on the far east market, question is for how long can that continue?

@jetter.  While it is expected that ‘sophisticated’ financial analysis was done before purchasing ARC, I very seriously doubt that this did much if anything to the continuation of a successful business. How many times have we seen folk pay multi millions for businesses that fundamentally were worth ‘peanuts’, and had extensive and sophisticated’ financial analysis done prior to acquisition? Makes me laugh…