Mark Levinson - what have I bought?

 “I was hired to do some recording for a film about Joan Baez; it was my job to spec the equipment. I learned that the only portable mixer at the time was made by Nagra, but it clipped very easily. We had Neumann condenser microphones on Joan and the other musicians, and the inputs on the mixer would overload all the time. And I thought maybe something should be done about this.

“In those days, film sound was really about dialog, not high-quality music on location. I realized there was a need for something, and around the same time, I was introduced to Dick Burwen, a real scientist and engineer with a tremendously deep background. Dick was willing to mentor me, and our first project was making a mixer for the Baez film. I did the design and he built the modules. He mentored me on how to make something work well.

“We built four of them before we realized that film professionals were not willing to pay for quality; as long as sound came out, that was good enough. So there wasn’t much of a path there. At one point, one of our associates said, ‘While we’re thinking about what to do next, can we listen to some music?’ And I said, ‘Well, we need a preamp. Why don’t we make one? We have these modules sitting around.’ So I called Dick and asked if we could build a preamp, and he agreed.

“That unit, which I called the LNP-1 for ‘low-noise preamp,’ ended up on a shelf in my parents’ home. A guy came by who was going to buy a pair of speakers I had, and he asked to hear it. So I played the system, and he said, ‘Wow, that’s amazing! Do you know how many people would want to buy this thing?’ I started thinking that I might be able to make some money. That was the impetus to develop the LNP-2 in 1972 under the Mark Levinson brand, which became an audiophile classic.”