Kinda fun historical note

Doc B. · 1391

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Offline Doc B.

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on: November 24, 2015, 04:51:04 AM
Found this article written about us 17 years ago -

http://web.kitsapsun.com/archive/1998/11-12/0058_audio__now_hear_this.html

Dan "Doc B." Schmalle
President For Life
Bottlehead Corp.


Offline Natural Sound

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Reply #1 on: November 24, 2015, 05:49:54 AM
Excellent read and well written piece from Steve. For the record can you list the original members of the club? I'm pretty certain that I'd recognize a few of them. 

PS I like the email address at prodigy. I had an account with them and compuserve once upon a time.



Offline jjvornov

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Reply #2 on: November 24, 2015, 06:38:13 AM
Fun for me reading this while Tidal streams uncompressed CD data on a 2015 Macbook Pro which feeds a Meridian Explorer DAC into an original Foreplay and a pair original S.E.X. amps (upgraded iron) to a pair of ProAc Tablettes sitting on my desk. Are these original amps really just one pair out of a few hundred?

I will say that in near 20 years the digital front end has improved, but the sound of Doc's tubes is just as alive and spacious as it ever was.

James



Offline Doc B.

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Reply #3 on: November 24, 2015, 07:22:17 AM
Hmm, off the top of my head Dave Dintenfass, Eric Lenius, George Wright, and about nine others showed up for the first meeting or two. Over the next couple years PJ, Richard Riley, Ed Fallon,  John Tucker, a little later PB and guys like Nick, Gordon, John Ferguson, Dan Hayes, Cameron Etazadi, Brad Brooks, Gary Dahl, Gary Pimm, Lynn Olson, John Chapman, Tony Glynn, John Stearns, Jim Lissa, Mike Matesky and many others joined in at least occasionally. Eventually we got up to maybe 30 people showing up for a meet. We were never a formal club with dues or any of that stuff, so there wasn't any formal membership roster. You just showed up if you wanted to. I had hoped that the meets would eventually rotate around to different people's homes. A few generous folks offered up their homes here and there, but the majority of the meets happened at Chez Bottlehead. I think we had close to 90 meetings altogether over 7 or 8 years not including VSAC, a big meeting where about 600 people would show up.

And yes, there were not that many original S.E.X. amps. Off the top of my head I can't say how many, but probably not more than a hundred or two. There are many, many more of the later and current stereo version redo by PJ out there. I have the first two pair of original S.E.X. amp monoblocks here at BHQ, my prototypes and the first pair I sold - to Tony Glynn. Foreplay was the biggest seller back then, with several thousand sold.

Dan "Doc B." Schmalle
President For Life
Bottlehead Corp.