Thank you clio09 for the thoughtful tribute to a great guy.
Roger was a good friend for 25 years. From the outset, his passion for his products was what struck me the most. He was always experimenting, questioning, innovating, and as a result he developed a depth of understanding for audio circuits that I doubt has been equaled by anyone. Transformer design, a black art to most, was his specialty. By building countless hundreds with his own hands and testing their behavior, he achieved a level of perfection that is clearly evident by listening to the amplifiers he sold. Most important to him was selling a product that would work flawlessly for a very long time. In his designs and construction, he considered everything from the operating parameters of the tubes to the quality of the lowly resistors. Those who own a RM-9, RM-10, or RM-200 possess a masterpiece.
Roger's love of electronics was contagious. When I hung out with him, I always went home wanting to build something. I once brought him a design I found for a singled-ended 6L6 stereo amp, and he provided me with many of the parts to build it. He even let me wind the output transformers on his winder. He enjoyed teaching and watching the light bulb go off in people's heads. His favorite question for the newbie: How much current flows in a 100W lamp? You better have shouted "1 amp!" pretty quickly or he'd be disappointed.
Roger could fix anything electronic. When he was a teenager, he got a job in a TV repair shop, and was quickly able to diagnose and fix a TV issue in 20 minutes (the requirement for the store technicians). You could bring him a schematic for just about anything, and he could zero in on the potential problem areas immediately. You needed to have a lot of time when you visited him, for a simple question about electronics often resulted in a 1 hour answer complete with several pages of handwritten notes!
One of Roger's passions was his computerized tester for matching tubes. He developed this on an Apple II computer in the mid 80s. The software was a very lo-o-o-ong BASIC program that he was very adept at tweaking on the fly. About 5 years ago, his two Apple IIs were failing regularly, and finding replacements on eBay was getting harder, so we set about moving the whole thing to an Arduino microcontroller. He built the interface between the Arduino and the high voltage circuitry, and I translated that long BASIC program into several dozen C programming language functions. Roger had a very old dot-matrix printer that he used to print the labels for the tube boxes, and he insisted that the Arduino print the test results on it. So I had to make the Arduino spit out characters slowly enough so the printer could keep up! What a pleasure it was to work side-by-side with him on that project. We were both very proud when the first test completed and that printer squealed to life!
And now he's gone. For those of us who knew him well, this is a staggering loss. I will remember him as a gifted mind, a perpetual student, a generous teacher, and wonderful friend.
Bless you Roger!
Roger was a good friend for 25 years. From the outset, his passion for his products was what struck me the most. He was always experimenting, questioning, innovating, and as a result he developed a depth of understanding for audio circuits that I doubt has been equaled by anyone. Transformer design, a black art to most, was his specialty. By building countless hundreds with his own hands and testing their behavior, he achieved a level of perfection that is clearly evident by listening to the amplifiers he sold. Most important to him was selling a product that would work flawlessly for a very long time. In his designs and construction, he considered everything from the operating parameters of the tubes to the quality of the lowly resistors. Those who own a RM-9, RM-10, or RM-200 possess a masterpiece.
Roger's love of electronics was contagious. When I hung out with him, I always went home wanting to build something. I once brought him a design I found for a singled-ended 6L6 stereo amp, and he provided me with many of the parts to build it. He even let me wind the output transformers on his winder. He enjoyed teaching and watching the light bulb go off in people's heads. His favorite question for the newbie: How much current flows in a 100W lamp? You better have shouted "1 amp!" pretty quickly or he'd be disappointed.
Roger could fix anything electronic. When he was a teenager, he got a job in a TV repair shop, and was quickly able to diagnose and fix a TV issue in 20 minutes (the requirement for the store technicians). You could bring him a schematic for just about anything, and he could zero in on the potential problem areas immediately. You needed to have a lot of time when you visited him, for a simple question about electronics often resulted in a 1 hour answer complete with several pages of handwritten notes!
One of Roger's passions was his computerized tester for matching tubes. He developed this on an Apple II computer in the mid 80s. The software was a very lo-o-o-ong BASIC program that he was very adept at tweaking on the fly. About 5 years ago, his two Apple IIs were failing regularly, and finding replacements on eBay was getting harder, so we set about moving the whole thing to an Arduino microcontroller. He built the interface between the Arduino and the high voltage circuitry, and I translated that long BASIC program into several dozen C programming language functions. Roger had a very old dot-matrix printer that he used to print the labels for the tube boxes, and he insisted that the Arduino print the test results on it. So I had to make the Arduino spit out characters slowly enough so the printer could keep up! What a pleasure it was to work side-by-side with him on that project. We were both very proud when the first test completed and that printer squealed to life!
And now he's gone. For those of us who knew him well, this is a staggering loss. I will remember him as a gifted mind, a perpetual student, a generous teacher, and wonderful friend.
Bless you Roger!
