Designer Hall of Fame

Victor Khomenko and BAT for making simple harder to build circuits with minimal gain stages and no global feedback. My system is 600 watts per channel and has 3 gain stages per channel, well four including the gain stage in source I suppose. That is keeping to the basics of what is best for circuits IMO keeping a short signal path and keeping it straight forward. Too many companies are putting multiple gain stages and feedback in there equipment and when you hear one without all that you realize how much timing, detail, and just raw quick power is affected.

Peter Walker for the Quad II power amplifier and the ESL 57 electrostat.

Kevin Edwards of Talk Electronics is genius.
Nelson Pass of Pass Labs

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?

Indeed it does and I know lots of manufacturers that test others to find out what they like and or dislike about a unit and will test it in the design stages. Its good to test your competition and see how you compare. I also remember reading a review wrote where Victor met his partner and listened to his system and told him he could build a better amp, so his not then partner said prove it, I think he did. From what I understand he had been building stuff like that for years for himself tinkering with things as a hobby but never did it to make money till he met his partner.