Does Anybody Remember Rocket Speakers?

i owned several pair in the day from AV123. I particularly liked the RS850's in my HT. 

AV123.com was the brain child of the audiophile industry's Bernie Madoff, Mark Schifter. 

Ugh... 

He went to prison for defrauding children's charities with audiophile gear auctions if I got the story right. https://www.audioholics.com/news/av123-mark-schifter-indicted-grand-jury 

futureaudiophile

He went to prison for defrauding children's charities ...

Nope, 20 years probation. Story here.

He signed a contract with me (we knew a lot of the same people such as Howard Schilling and Bob Rapport) and he just stiffed me for $40,000. 

Then he tells me "why don't you come to Denver and I will buy you a steak dinner and let you drive my Porsche Boxster" 

For the record, I was driving a 1997 911 Turbo then. I just sent him a photo and moved on. 

Wasn’t Danny of GR Research contributing to speaker design of some sort for them?  The audio circle forum is where I found some more info on them awhile back.  I have my old 750’s as my garage speakers now but those things have survived a few cross country moves and still sound great for what they are.  Too bad about the founder.  

Prior to this there was the Perpetual Technology 'thing'. I bought into the whole concept, dsp possibility for all speakers was going to be a reality, never happened. On the other hand, Dan Wright and my own diy mods brought that stack up to very high level of sound quality. 

Yes I owned the RS750 as well as the Ref1 back in the day.

As an owner of RS850 Sig, RS450 Sig and RSC200 sig and a long time (20 years) follower of Danny, I know quite a bit about it.

Dick Pierce was the designer of the hardware and original crossover of the AV123 Rockets. The crossover design wasn’t great and AV123 asked Danny Richie if he could step in and redesign the crossover.

This became some of the Signature series speakers.

The 850 Sig, 450, and RSC200 Sig all had a completely redesigned Danny Richie crossover that was known to be much better designed, had significantly better parts, crossed over lower which greatly improved vertical off-axis and didn’t have tweeter rolloff like the original had.

The 850, RSS-300, RSC200, 750 and 750 Sig always had the Dick Pierce crossover. The only difference that I’m aware of is the 750 Sig changed the tweeter resister value to one that wasn’t as rolled off as that was a big complaint at the time.

Here’s a little talk from Danny about them: https://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=186471.0

I’ve personally moved on to another AV123 product and own a full set of 4 AV123 X-Static and a X-Voce center which were 100% Danny Richie’s design and he still stocks replacement drivers to this day. Most of the GR-Research X-Series was available from AV123 at the time https://gr-research.com/x-series-3/ 

Ah yes, lots of fond memories of the AV123/Rocket era. It felt like a great community on the forums back then, and the product being delivers was (mostly) very high quality for the money (until it wasn't). 

Shame about Mark, turned out to be a real scumbag. So many lies, broken promises big and small, continuing even until fairly recently as far as I recall - see the Core Power Technologies fiasco which left plenty of Agon forum members waiting ages for their product to show up. Mark supposedly sold that company for "health" reasons only to pop up soon after with a new company called Vera-Fi Audio. None of it makes sense, no idea why industry people seem to give Mark chance after chance after chance when his behavior never changes. 

Yes, I remember the community had a cultish devotion to Mark and would attack anyone that didn't eternally praise their av123 speakers. 

Value always is popular - especially if you are some our younger audiophiles out there. 

The question is: does is matter WHO you are buying your gear from? 

Would you buy a Tesla from "King Elon?" I won't. 

Would you buy a $4,000 fuse of $35,000 pair of speaker cables from My Pillow guy down here in Orange County when he sits in his Ferrari and makes fun of Gene from Audioholics for catching COVID from the RBH guys in the second week of March 2020? YouTube.com video and everything? I can pass on that too. 

But there are others who don't care. And that's their prerogative. 

One of the most liberal (and quite gay) ex-industry execs is an EV enthusiast and he and his husband BOTH drive Teslas. They say "buy one used and get indy service". I love those boys but I am can't go with that. Mercedes EVs have the same depreciation. Many other options. Hyundai, even. Many. Rivian. So many.