Well, at least outside of Japan, where they always marched to the beat of a different active device.
![]() But it does bear remembering when one enters the world of extreme audio. I could name a few hundred of said miscreants but do not want to put another Porsche in the garage of Hi-Fi Choices corporate lawyer. But such is human nature that we automatically assume that we get what we pay for, and that a 20,000 amplifier just has to be better than a 2000 amplifier. What few wish to recognise is that its been around ever since specialty or separates audio began, right after World War II, when huge consoles containing record players and radios were split into their constituent parts. More importantly, the arrival of the LP and of FM radio provided sources that demanded more than the bandwidth of then-available hardware. And, yes, both quality and price created the market sector, with early, pioneering brands like Marantz, harman-kardon and McIntosh in the USA and Quad and Radford in the UK exhibiting superior performance that one paid for commensurately. While not as extreme as the top-priced models of today, such brands were still not aimed at middle income groups. Audio Hi Fi Magazines Professional In TheBut even ignoring the industrys elimination of a price ceiling since the 1970s, still you had to be a well-paid professional in the 1950s to afford Quad or McIntosh. No more self-inflicted limitations, as Peter Walker limited the size he would design up to, as well as the prices hed charge. Power output, speaker dimensions there were no more boundaries. Gordon Holt to produce another copy of his revered title, Stereophile. The latter was the unofficial mouthpiece of an ever-increasing audiophile underground, and Holt was prescient in recognising the need to present an alternative voice to that of the mainstream magazines. American mainstream magazines were utterly non-critical and in the thrall of advertisers; magazines like Stereophile and The Absolute Sound offered genuine criticism, showing no fear of the multinationals. Conversely, the UK didnt have to spawn an underground press, because the newsstand titles were never controlled by the advertisers and were as gutsy from the early 1970s onward as the American guerrilla press. This may sound nave and unlikely, but its true: the British audio press always had teeth. What was being ignored were the cult specialty brands that eschewed features and chased the sort of power outputs were still re-discovering with products like Musical Fidelitys Supercharger. Among them were makes like Phase Linear, SAE and Dunlap-Clarke, edgy brands that thought 250Wch should be the norm in an era when a 60Wch amp was considered high-powered. With hindsight we see that concurrent with the arrival of such massive amplifiers were new speaker brands, including Magneplanar, Dayton-Wright, Acoustat, Dahlquist, Beveridge and others. Some employed conventional drivers; many looked to radical alternatives, including electrostatics inspired by Quad and other dipoles or panels. Box-type speakers were being relegated to the middle and lower sectors. Johnson was (almost single-handedly) reviving valve amplifiers.
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