Beerdraft, it might interest you that Victor's partner was a customer of ours and had bought 2 sets of our amps and a preamp. I spent a few hours on the phone with Victor while he had one of the amps open on his bench, trying to model it in P-Spice (that required a schematic and that was why the amp was being examined). Victor was trying to tell me that the amp did not work (in P-Spice) and I was asking him 'did you listen to it?'. Back then (1993 or thereabouts) P-Spice had terrible models for vacuum tubes :)
I can't say after his reverse-engineering our amp that he copied it- clearly he did not as he used a different driver circuit so neither our patent nor copyrights were violated. But it was obviously an influence- minimal number of gain stages (our amp has only one), no feedback, Circlotron output section, triode operation, fully differential and balanced throughout... sound familiar?
