So Many Apogees for sale, and so few takers

Jason Bloom of Apogee was the biggest jerk I ever met in audio. When you would walk into his room at CES he was so arrogant and he would not let you play music you knew well. He was the kind of person you would want to kick in the ass. The exact opposite of say Jeff Rowland. The best I have heard them were with two Classe 25 watt all class A amplifiers. I liked them better than when I heard the speakers with Krell or Threshold. Another good amp sound was with the original Meitner Amps.

One huge difference is that Maggies are still made, and supported by the company. They'll refurbish almost all of their speakers, even custom-build drivers for discontinued models if you need one, as I discovered when Fedex did a job on my Tympanis. You can replace a treble ribbon for a fraction of the cost of a Graz ribbon -- not criticizing Graz here, but he's a relatively small volume operation. If your bass drivers are delaminating and you have a weekend, you can fix them yourself with Magnepan's kit for $40, where a new Apogee bass driver would cost you thousands. It all makes Maggies a much more practical option.

I do wish I could get my hands on a couple of Apogee midrange ribbon drivers, though, and put them in my Tympanis. :-) This is one of the few areas I think in which an Apogee will beat a Tympani, but it's a crucial one, since the midrange is the soul of the music. There are some DIY midrange ribbon projects on DIY audio, but it looks like they'd take a summer.

I think it's also true that there are a lot more Maggies out there, and both the new and used prices offer inimitable bang for the buck. Apogees were more expensive to make and repair, which is apparently the main reason the company went out of business.

I think they went out of business as a result of Magneplanar suing them for patent infringement.

I sued to think that, too, but apparently it wasn't the case. It seems they went out because they were too expensive to make and repair (they had a large number of ribbon failures). The Grand in particular, while by all accounts one of the best speakers ever made, was too expensive to make. The company that bought them looked at what they owed and at the state of the high end audio market, and decided to close them down.

If you do a search you can find some accounts of what happened.

Essential Audio we gave the Lazarus H1A's a good try unfortunately it never came to pass. Hope you are doing well. Bob