Designer Hall of Fame

Beerdraft, no, we don't make transistor amps. We're known for making OTLs but we've been in business nearly 34 years and in that time seen a lot of OTL manufacturers come and go. One of the signs that an OTL manufacturer is going to go out of business is when they introduce either a transistor or hybrid amp. At least, that's been the history so far...

For the record......
BAT amps are not OTL. So I'm not quite sure what implication Atmasphere is trying to make regarding any OTL manufacturer going out of business once trying to make transistor or hybrid amps. Secondly, BAT's first transistor offering was introduced within the first year of their company which was over ten years ago. So they've essentially had both tube and solid state from the very beginning and still no signs of it having any negative impact on them.

Further, and this is the biggest point......
When Victor decided to begin building HiFi equipment he came to it already with a very solid set of ideas from not only his days designing electronics in the former Soviet military but also quite a fair amount of time designing precision test equipment for HP. In other words, his design philosophies were pretty much already set. The fact that he took the time to survey who in the HiFi industry may have already been implementing ideas that he intended to use is a far cry from imitating them. I find it incredibly presumptuous to make such an assertion in a public forum such as this.
One of the other brands that VK surveyed at the time happened to be Jeff Rowland Design and yet I dont see Jeff going around claiming HE was the inspiration for BAT.
Just Sayin.

More to the point of the thread.....
I'd have to agree with Vicdamone on this one. Too many people on this list who were merely clever at marketing.

It's a surprise that no one has mentioned John Curl yet.
His diversity and agility include....
Ampex tape recorders
SOTA head amplifier
Mark Levinson JC-2
CTC Blowtorch

And I doubt any other designer can beat the "cool factor" of having designed the sound system for the Greatful Dead's road show. ;)

John Curl has to be listed somewhere on this list - one of the greats (and cool). Oh, and that fella Williamson too.

Prdprez, Victor's first prototype was essentially an OTL, using a set of our Z-Music autoformers as the output transformer. In production he used a toroidal device similar to the ZERO.

Victor's partner, Steve Bednarski, was a customer of ours. His sister was/is a block from me, so Steve came to visit since he was in the area. According to him, Victor was inspired when he saw the MA-1s, enough to borrow a set from Steve (Steve had 2 pair and one of our very first MP-1 preamps, to this day we still have his warranty form on file) to see how it worked. Later. Victor called me asking me a lot of questions regarding its operation, as he had been trying to simulate it in P-Spice on his computer- hence my comments from an earlier post. Seriously, that does not sound like he had any plans of going in the Circlotron direction until that time, else he would have had no need to create the schematic from our amps to see how it all worked.

I think though that he was cognizant that an outright copy of the amp would be a bad move, so for example he used a different voltage amplifier/driver topology, that of a differential cascade circuit. He did not know this but we had also used that approach (there are only a few ways of driving a Circlotron if you want a fully-differential circuit) and abandoned it in 1985.

But I was not referring to BAT at all in my comment regarding OTL manufacturers and transistors. I was addressing a comment by Beerdraft- 'no, we don't make transistor amps and here is why'.