Audio Research in Receivership.

My comment about 2-chanel sales being way down was from a source that sells Sonus Faber, McIntosh and other high-end equipment. He had nothing to gain from telling me what he is hearing in dealer meetings and experiencing even in the "white-hot" home real estate market in DFW. While there may be a backlog of orders, they’re not getting replaced with new ones. Why else would Audio Advice recently run a sale on Anthem 8k AVMs and AVRs (yes I know, it’s not the same level as AR) that were really hard to find a year ago? We can thank our "overlords" for pumping all that cheap $ into the economy that is now much more restricted. Yes it was hearsay, but it is from a reliable source.

My money is on the post in the other thread that says the new owners will bleed the company dry then dump it. So much greed and don’t give a s*** what happens to anyone in this world. 

Very sad.  I’d like to think there’s enough brand equity built up in ARC that someone reputable could see value in simply providing better management.  But, it really all comes down to who buys them.  There are several success stories where an acquirer didn’t mess up the “secret sauce” of a company and it successfully goes on, but there are others — Thiel comes to mind — where it was completely mishandled and a miserable failure.  In this case I sincerely hope this follows the former as it would be a big loss for the audio community at large to lose a company, and its products, of this stature.

ARC is an iconic American brand. My biggest fear is that someone might buy it and only focus on capitalizing the brand name at the expense of everything else that was responsible for giving ARC near-legendary status. I won't be surprised if most of production is moved overseas with only final assembly taking place in the U.S. so they can continue to milk the US heritage. Many iconic brands of yesteryears have faced similar fate.