Are Theta amps made by Ayre ?

The now out of production Dreadnaught I was essentially designed by Charles Hansen of Ayre. Theta then took the basic modules used in that design and went all out to create the Citadel monos. Later, Theta took the Dreadnaught I and tweaked it to make it less musical but more powerful on the low end thereby creating the Dreadnaught II, most likely in an attempt to better appeal to the HT crowd it is primarily aimed at.

Don't forget that Ayre makes its own multi-channel amplifier in the V-6xe:

http://www.ayre.com/products_detail.cfm?productid=9

Charles Hansen, founder of Ayre, helped in the design of the Dreadnaught. The Theta amps are not manufactured by Ayre.

Theta amps are made by......Theta. I assume you are looking at a Dreadnaught or Dreadnaught II. Charlie Hansen of Ayre Acoustics did contribute his expertise in designing the original Dreadnaught.

The circuit topology in the original Dreadnaught was a collaborative effort between David Reich of Theta, Charles Hansen of Ayre, and Jim White of Aesthetix. The Dreadnaught II offered improvements that were designed by David Reich at Theta.

All of the posts are essentially correct except the one by Fsarc. The first Dreadnaught amp wasn't really a collaboration between myself, Jim White, and David Reich. Here's the real scoop:

I met Jim White at the Tokyo Hi-Fi show around 1998 or so. Theta wanted to get into the amplifier market. Jim White specified the feature set (up to five channels, modular design so that channels could be added, single power transformer, size, cost, power, et cetera). I designed the amp and built them a prototype. Just as I was finishing the design, Dave Reich left McCormack Audio and Theta hired him. Since they now had their own amp designer, Dave did the final production testing and made slight changes to the bias circuit and also how the input circuit switched between single-ended and balanced. That was it. The rest of the amp was my design.

Charles Hansen
Ayre Acoustics, Inc.