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RE: Stereophile Reaches a New Nadir

> > Richard Vandersteen is rated and not Peter walker ....! That's crazy Charles < <

Obviously any list is going to be incomplete and imperfect. I included Richard Vandersteen as I live in the US. He has sold hundreds of thousands of pairs of speakers, has a distinct design philosophy and each of his dozen or so products keeps getting better. I don't think he influenced that many other designers, but one thing he did was figure out a way to make a really ugly complex compound enclosure look good by hiding it all behind grill cloth - a few companies copied that idea.

Walker probably sold a huge number of his ESLs in England, but they are fairly rare in the States. He only made two models. Both of them were basically "best of" collages of other's ideas, and he admitted as much. Most of his "genius" was simply in inventing production methods. However so much hand labor was involved that after his death the tooling (if I recall correctly) was sold to a German company that couldn't make a profitable operation of it as there was so much labor involved. Finally it was sold to a company that builds them in China, where skilled hand labor is fairly common and ridiculously cheap. They raised the prices significantly, and keep introducing new models that are just variants of the '63. I don't know of any other ESL designers that were influenced by Walker - they mostly went back to the original sources that he used.

It's just a post in an online forum. I wouldn't take it too seriously.

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