Retro Hi End Trivia Question

Gain cells, Koss, Beveridge, Cotter bases, Fulton Gold cables, 16 inch Fidelity Research tonearms...
Whimsical, often absurd, from musical to criminal, all Dr.Suess audio from that era is eclipsed by the Hill Plasmatronics. Speakers of refrigerator girth, the top 1/3 of the cabinet housed electronics, in the middle was a odor producing purple plasma tweeter, the bottom was home to a paper 15" and 8". But the feature that granted owners unchallenged bragging rights? 5 foot tall, 50 lb. capacity helium tanks hooked to each one! Yikes!
The sequence to turn on the two devices was a ritual of awe and fear. They made horrid clacking noises followed by the rush of escaping gas being detonated by several thousand volt lightning bolt like arcs! These things were better suited to a castle lab than listening room.
To this day, no other designer has had balls to put a backlit switch etched with the word "IGNITE" on a speaker.

I AM SITTING HERE WITH ONE HOOKED TO A NAKAMICHI 630 AND
SOME JBL'S IT PLAYS AND SOUNDS GREAT ITS NEVER FAILED ME
AS OF YET AND THE BASE POUNDS!!!!!.

I pulled a Quatre DG-250 out of a dumpster in Jan '01. It had three dated repair tags on it, the latest from '93. Figuring that it had been tossed because of internal meltdown, I powered it up by slowly applying mains voltage through a Variac and measured reasonable DC across the Foster's beer-can-sized filter caps. No DC on the outputs. Much better than I expected from a dumpster dive. In a fit of bravado, I hooked it up to my Snell C-1s and my SS preamp and listened for about 5 minutes before grit-induced fatigue set in. It turned out that at some point the output transistors and half of the driver transistors in one channel had been replaced, and the output stage bias current was set very low. Bringing the bias up to about 100mA got rid of most of the grit. Bass was firm but midrange seemed congested and treble was brittle. I much prefer my Audionics CC-2 modified for inverting input. Considering the outlay in time and money, the Quatre is OK, my guess is that the quasi-complimentary output stage holds it back and stability under load is questionable.

I use to work at the factory! I was the sales manager for about a year - selling amps direct, advertising in the classified section of the LA Times. When I was selling amps - which was highly rated and cutted edge and inexpensive (and gorgeous) - other high dealers were selling anything but amps.

The gain cell circuit allowed the amp to clip with even-ordered harmonics, which was one of the reasons it had a "liquid" (tube) like sound. The bass was simply the best there was at the time. Still pretty good. Bought one on eBay for sentimental purposes and was suprised how good it sounded - so dynamic. Kinda like my Creek 4340SE. If I can find the time I might compare the two.

I have a Dunlap-Clarke Dreadnaught 1000, and it's still in daily use after 28 years! It's built like a tank, and I use it to drive the woofers on my Infinity RS1s.
The sound is comparable to other '70s solid state amps in this genre; very similar to the Marantz 500.
Whoever these guys were that engineered it built it to last -- it's one of my favorite vintage components.