Classics and Cults. Bogus Journalism?

Again a great thread you are starting. The amp you mention, was it the Rapaport? If the audio writers would not "discover" new stuff to rave over, their rags would bore us stiff, no one would read them anymore, no more advertising. Finito. All this does not have to be bogus. They need new blood to stay alive. I suppose its in the system. Besides, I think its tough for a new design to really reach the market over a longer strech of time. A bright young designer starting from a garage might with luck get rave review somewhere and then be swamped with orders, which he cannot fulfill. So he has to go in search of capital to start his small business in some industrial park and mostly he is heavily into debt. Now he should advertise, what he probably cannot afford, dealers are mostly overstocked, might take in a unit or two, but tend to pay him only, when they have sold them and soon there is a new king, the press is raving over and our friend, disillusioned, is back in his garage, probably cleaning it out, because he has to sell his house to pay his bank. These days, I feel, you need to have a lot of financial backing to start a new line on the market. Sad but true.

Oh there was the Beverdige preamp, a Roger Modjieski design, beautifully made and executed, an early two chassis job and expensive, done and financed by the speaker people, also long defunct. Harry Pearson at the time was so infatuated by the SP 8 that it needed just one review of his, comparing the two, to kill the precariously financed endevour once and for all. For a while you could have them fairly cheap, so I got myself another one and ran one for each channel. I remember a glorious liquid midrange, as soon as I had thrown Roger's Russian ECC83's out. ( I think, there were 12 of them in the thing. )

Correction: Now I'm not sure, probably it was the SP 6 not the SP 8 HP kept on raving about in those old days.

Garfish, thanks for your kind words and Doug, there was even an amp by Jim Bongiorno, designer and proprietor of GAS called Grandson (of Ampzilla). All his designs carried a huge pair of sexy looking watt meters in front, were full of fairly cheap parts, had plenty of slam and slightly nasty highs when pushed. That's all I can remember. Don't know what happened to JB. RCPrince, I've also owned one of the early BEL's, beautifully made and layed out, the bass of which indeed proved as a revelation at the time, but I also remember sweet and quite extended highs. Used them for a while on Quads and later to drive my Maggie bass panels, where they proved to be a bit underpowered. Drubin, John Iverson's career as a designer and businessman I think, is a typical case in point to my first post in this thread: He was always undercapitalised, was catapulted by positive reviews in the press into a flood sudden demands he could not meet, hence got heavily into debt in building up the necessary production infrastructure, tried to sell direct, when his turnover slowed, annoying his dealers, was understaffed, so that repair turnover time was long, so annoying his customers as well and one day or rather night, the man just disappeared, leaving house, wife, production place and has to my knowledge never been seen or heard of since. But enough of gossip already! Sorry for the typo: Modjieski's preamp was called the Beveridge, not Beverdige, as I had written. Perhaps someone remembers now?