Peavey made their mark beginning in the 1960s with their high-powered, bulletproof amps and stage speaker cabinets at affordable prices. Hartley Peavey did it well. He saw opportunities and went for them. He kept his prices reasonable when big money bought Fender and other big stage players, quality went down and prices skyrocketed. Sound familiar?
One of my formative jobs after developing the production capacity for Thiel Audio, was Peavey’s development of Eddie VanHalen’s Wolfgang Guitar. I helped crack the code to reliably get the sound that Eddie wanted, based on wood particulars. I moved to New Hampshire to supply (over 5 years' time) 17,000 Birdseye Maple neck/fingerboard sets and Basswood bodies from wood that I personally selected in Northeast US and Canada, milled in New Hampshire, specially dried in Massachusetts, and sent on to Jeremy Kling (my godson) in Lexington to turn into matched sets for Peavey. Big job - got me into the high-end tonewood production business, traveling the world selecting wood from sustainable sources, including a sunken ship, typhoon and hurricane cleanups, Amazonian replant projects, deconstruction of a railroad trestle and old buildings, among others. What a trip.
I think that Peavey is chugging along nicely as an all-american innovative manufacturer with a good reputation and world-wide distribution.