Top Audio Designers Of All Time?


We have all had fun and world of info have spilled forth from Audiogon members. Lets give ourselves a round of applause. From me a sincere "Well Done" to all members that have participated. I have learned a great deal. In this thread,which may be a little esoteric for some,lets hear from members that support certain designers. After all if not for their dedication and genius,we would not have the topic or equipment. Ill start the thread for the inventor Thomas Alva Edison.For it was his revolution,that we now find ourselves here. In the more contemporary era I vote for Nelson Pass. His white paper on Cascode/Stasis toplogy was and is truly ground breaking. In my opinion since 1975,other designs are a variation on a theme of Pass.
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Tom Colangelo - Cello, Ltd., for the Audio Palette, the Audio Suite, and the Performance II monoblocks, among others. Cello (Mark Levinson) gave Tom the freedom to design without a price point (although I suppose that "inexpensive," "reasonable," and even "very expensive" were taken off the table) - his circuits are therefore big, bold, tough as tanks, and suffer from very few, if any, compromises. The Performance II, for example, is powered by a dual-choke supply capable of sinking 1000W into 1 ohm, yet the amp is not just a solid-state brute - it is also delicate and very, very fast. Cello equipment is not much in the mainstream, but for pushing old-style, analog (all adjectives of praise) audio to its sweetest limits, Tom is the man.
Can't single out one but they include several already mentioned - William Z. Johnson who was directly responsible for the rennissance of tube gear in the early 70's; Saul Marantz, one of the great pioneers of quality audio gear and certainly Nelson Pass for the best solid state designs I am aware of. I would also concur with some of the pioneers mentioned above.
Pass - for elegant and impossibly simple designs, Conrad-Johnson for directively building lush sounding components, Johnson (audio research) for building the most natural sounding high resolution amps I've heard, Vandersteen for building affordable speakers (and keeping it that way), McCormack for an inspired design that he chose to keep affordable, Fisher for building wonderful tube electronics back in the 60's, Winey for spending years refining and finally perfecting (just about!) the magneplanar speaker. I have to stop! Too many great people! We also need to remember their dedicated staff engineers who have done much of the work too.