Designer Hall of Fame

Yeah, a Clint Eastwood with lazers!! I understand he demonstrated a high power lazer to a class that he taught, punching a hole through a brick wall. The next day supposedly the FBI showed up and classified it.

Robert Fulton founded the modern interconnect and speaker cable industry- before him there was no-one. Of course he was thought of as a snake oil salesman, but many of his claims are now borne out by the continued existence of the cable industry itself.

Just before he died, Bob had created a new speaker that used a concept he called the 'oval window'. It was some sort of modified Helmholtz resonator- Bob claimed that the oval window cut off one octave below the cutoff of the woofers in the speaker. Whatever you might believe about that, I can tell you that it did play some of the most effortless bass I have heard in a speaker.

He disappeared one year when he was supposed to be going to CES. The FBI got involved and was watching his home and had his phone redirected. There were a lot of weird rumors (faked his death, went into hiding, weird inventions, paranoia, that sort of thing), but there has been no official story to my knowledge.

Beerdraft, it might interest you that Victor's partner was a customer of ours and had bought 2 sets of our amps and a preamp. I spent a few hours on the phone with Victor while he had one of the amps open on his bench, trying to model it in P-Spice (that required a schematic and that was why the amp was being examined). Victor was trying to tell me that the amp did not work (in P-Spice) and I was asking him 'did you listen to it?'. Back then (1993 or thereabouts) P-Spice had terrible models for vacuum tubes :)

I can't say after his reverse-engineering our amp that he copied it- clearly he did not as he used a different driver circuit so neither our patent nor copyrights were violated. But it was obviously an influence- minimal number of gain stages (our amp has only one), no feedback, Circlotron output section, triode operation, fully differential and balanced throughout... sound familiar?

Beerdraft, I agree with you that some manufacturers do do that. I'm pretty sure the rest of that is apocryphal. We heard his amps almost right away...

Beerdraft, no, we don't make transistor amps. We're known for making OTLs but we've been in business nearly 34 years and in that time seen a lot of OTL manufacturers come and go. One of the signs that an OTL manufacturer is going to go out of business is when they introduce either a transistor or hybrid amp. At least, that's been the history so far...

Prdprez, Victor's first prototype was essentially an OTL, using a set of our Z-Music autoformers as the output transformer. In production he used a toroidal device similar to the ZERO.

Victor's partner, Steve Bednarski, was a customer of ours. His sister was/is a block from me, so Steve came to visit since he was in the area. According to him, Victor was inspired when he saw the MA-1s, enough to borrow a set from Steve (Steve had 2 pair and one of our very first MP-1 preamps, to this day we still have his warranty form on file) to see how it worked. Later. Victor called me asking me a lot of questions regarding its operation, as he had been trying to simulate it in P-Spice on his computer- hence my comments from an earlier post. Seriously, that does not sound like he had any plans of going in the Circlotron direction until that time, else he would have had no need to create the schematic from our amps to see how it all worked.

I think though that he was cognizant that an outright copy of the amp would be a bad move, so for example he used a different voltage amplifier/driver topology, that of a differential cascade circuit. He did not know this but we had also used that approach (there are only a few ways of driving a Circlotron if you want a fully-differential circuit) and abandoned it in 1985.

But I was not referring to BAT at all in my comment regarding OTL manufacturers and transistors. I was addressing a comment by Beerdraft- 'no, we don't make transistor amps and here is why'.

OV,who designed tube rectified OTL,using DHT tube as an OPT or any of the 7ac based tubes.Make it possible for kt66/88 or any 7ac based tube directly plugged into a 4 pin socket of a 6A3 single ended amp without amplifier mod.

The comment does not make any sense.

What if it does?

Even then it would not make sense. It contradicts itself.

Just a FWIW- Harvey didn't do any designs. Its George Kaye that was largely responsible for the NYAL designs- or Julius Futterman.