Interviews

As founder of California-based Vacuum Tube Logic of America, David Manley is at the forefront of the current renaissance in vacuum-tube audio equipment. In addition to manufacturing some highly regarded audiophile components, VTL has introduced a line of tubed professional equipment that is finding its way into recording studios. David has a lifetime of experience in tube electronics, recording studio design, disc cutting, music recording, and most recently, analog/digital and digital/analog converter design.

If high-end audio were to carve its own Mt. Rushmore, whose faces would appear there—besides that of Stereophile founder J">http://www.stereophile.com/interviews/66">J. Gordon Holt, of course? It's likely that no two audiophiles would ever come up with identical lists of subjects, but I wouldn't be surprised if they could agree on at least one name: Nelson">http://www.stereophile.com/interviews/1191pass">Nelson Pass.

Richard Sequerra was born in 1929 and raised in various parts of the US by his mother, who worked for the Department of State. By the time he was 20, he had launched a freelance career that has since spanned a wide range of technologies. During a stint at Marantz in the 1960s, he worked with Sidney Smith on that firm's famed Marantz 10B tuner, which was sold from 1964 through 1970. Subsequent products have included the Sequerra 1 tuner and the Metronome 7 loudspeaker, originally produced by Sequerra's firm Pyramid and now hand-assembled by its creator, who offers the most recent version via his websitehttp://www.sequerra.com">website;, for less than half what it cost through retail channels when Sam Tellig praised it in the July 2007 Stereophile. Sequerra's newest transducers—a self-amplified nearfield speaker and matching subwoofer designed for Internet music listening—remain in prototype form; he hopes to sell or license the designs rather than manufacture and market them himself.

Alon Wolf can be mesmerizing. When the founder of Magico gets going on one of his favorite subjects, loudspeaker design, the strength of his convictions, depth of technical knowledge, and sureness of response are enough to hush many a skeptic into silence.

As one of the founders of Threshold Corporation, its present chairman, and its longtime technical head, Nelson Pass has had a hand in the design and implementation of the products to come out of that company since its inception. His SA-1http://www.stereophile.com/solidpoweramps/16threshold">SA-1; power amplifier and FET">http://www.stereophile.com/solidpreamps/987fet10">FET 10 preamplifier have been long-term favorites of Stereophile founder J. Gordon Holt and I reviewed the Threshold">http://www.stereophile.com/solidpoweramps/1290thresh">Threshold SA-12/e power amplifier a year ago (Vol.13 No.12). I cornered him on a visit to Santa Fe...

I don't remember the year, but I remember the moment when I first became intensely curious about Roy DuNann. It must have been about 1975, right after I moved to Seattle. I bought a Sonny Rollins LP called Way Out West, took it home, cued it up on my Thorens turntable, dropped the tonearm, and suddenly I was in a room with Rollins and Shelly Manne and Ray Brown. It was a shipping room with records stacked on shelves all around the musicians, but I wouldn't know that until many years later.

When Hong Kong–based music lover and electronics-equipment distributor Klaus Heymann (footnote 1), now 70, first began organizing classical-music concerts as a way to boost sales, he had no idea he would end up founding the world's leading classical-music label. But after starting a record-label import business and meeting his future wife, leading violinist Takako Nishizaki, the German-born entrepreneur sought a way to promote her artistry. First he founded the HK label, which specialized in Chinese symphonic music (including Nishizaki's recording of Butterfly Lovers, the famous violin concerto by Chen Gang). Next he established Marco Polo, a label devoted to symphonic rarities.