Designer Hall of Fame

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'.

Tim de Paravicini