Homemade High End and Unsung Heroes


It seems to me that some of our hobbies legendary "engineers" aren't really engineers or designers at all but relentless salesmen masquerading as technical geniuses. Perhaps this explains why so many of you love to trash certain brands whose profile and success may have more to do with business than technical excellence. ONe amplifier company and one cable company in particular come to mind...Who are the real engineers, the people behind the scenes with talent and passion, who have really, genuinely made great and musical products? Let's give them the thanks and recognition that they deserve more than the snake oil promoters mugging for the audio press. I would like to try to build my own amplifiers and speakers and would love to hear more about the thinking and work of the masters.
golfnut18520f
I have a small problem with dunlavys. One the speakers use cheap sand resistors. Come on john spend a few dollars and get good resistors, that alone would cure the stuffiness that ja talks about.
John Dunlavy! He is a brilliant design Engineer. He has taken speaker design to levels it never dreamed of. He built a accoustic chamber for his testing that is one of only a handful on the planet, it is so far beyond any test chamber built. Not only is true and accurate sound reproduction his top priority, but it must be quantified by science. This was the major source of the Dunlavy's anger over the IVa dropping from Stereophiles class A restricted to class B full range. John Dunlavy can prove his speakers results to Stereophile, but J.A. cann't handle it. Dunlavy is upset because the testing Stereophile does is inferior to his own labs work, and yet Stereophile can claim lesser results as fact! I think not, this became a bone of contension and J.A. showed J.D. by admitting he was wrong in his tests but dropped his speaker from class A to B to get back at him. J.A. claims the speaker (3 times) was over rated by the reviewers, including himself and that class B is where it should have been all along. Hey J.A., how the hell could you make such a major blunder, Stereophiles' "product of the year" but it was over rated. I think this proved to me that the value of Stereophile is over rated, and J.A. cann't handle a sub $10,000 speaker sitting in his Class A full range list. How would the advertisers react. The phony is the audiophile "scientists" at Stereophile, the real class of designers, John Dunlavy!