Audio Research Factory Tour

If ARC is a big company (it is actually very small) how come there are only two assembly people in manufacturing, shown in the tour?

The plant looks like a ghost town!

Donc55,
good question but I guess that in a 20 minute video you can;t show everything. The main point is that every piece is hand built and the construction is a labor intensive process. Maybe there are not a lot of employees at this plant but they do make the point that some part of the manufacturing process is out sourced to local companies. I own two ARC amps and love them. I'm not sure if location makes a real difference but I am from the mid west and Minneapolis makes a lot of great products across many industries.

It's interesting to me what people expect in a 20 minute video. If you know the company's history and have owned and listened to many of their classic designs the video is a nice supplement to all that. I don't need to hear a soliloquy on circuit design. I appreciate seeing the people that have worked there for decades and have used that knowledge to  build great products we might own. It's gratifying to me to see the parts inventory and know that I can keep my treasured Ref 40 till I die and that ARC can restore or repair it with original parts to like new condition if anything ever goes wrong with it. Just hope I can get someone on the phone. Miss you Kalvin!

I don't see any ARC users (or anyone else, for that matter) saying, sorry I'm not buying your product because I don't know who designed it.

The original fans of Bill Johnson's designs, like the State-Of-The-Art SP-10 pre-amp and D-79 power amp, were dismayed when he handed over a lot of the ARC design work to Rich Larsen, who was largely responsible for the hybrid SP-11. That pre-amp ushered in the "dry/white/bleached" era of ARC sound. It's not that they didn't know who was doing the ARC design work, but rather that they did---Rich Larsen, not Bill Johnson. Rich's hybrid sound has obviously improved a lot since then.