Interviews

Stereophile Editor John Atkinson walked into our office brandishing a CD (footnote 1). "Guess what Ken Kantor did? He took a year off from running NHT (footnote 2) to make this disc."

With 25 years of experience in sound recording, audio retailing, and loudspeaker design and manufacturing, Ken Kreisel has insightful things to say about just about any audio-related subject. The president of Miller & Kreisel Sound Corp. (M&K), Kreisel pioneered the satellite/subwoofer speaker concept that laid the groundwork for the home theaters of today. M&K's most recent offering—the S-150THX surround speaker system—is reviewed in this issue (see archived article).

Jonathan Scull: You say your YBA CD-1 Blue Laser CD player makes use of Stochastic Resonance, Yves-Bernard?

Yves-Bernard André: Yes...in adding some noise to the signal, we can actually get more information back.

Although the term "professional" is often used as part of model designations in consumer electronics, the actual overlap between the audiophile consumer market and the real pro market is quite small. There are speakers in common use as studio monitors that no self-respecting audiophile would want to be caught dead listening to, and the typical audiophile loudspeaker would go up in smoke if asked to pump out the kind of volume that pro application routinely demands. To a lesser extent, the same applies to amplifiers: pro is pro and consumer is consumer, and ne'er the twain shall meet.

Jonathan Scull: How long has VTL been in business, Luke?

Luke Manley: My dad, David Manley, and I co-founded VTL in June of 1986. We started small on the East Coast, and soon after we moved to California.

Scull: Is it because you're really a West Coast kind of guy?

Manley: [laughs] You bet! There's a lot of supporting industries out there; a big base of electronics manufacturers, for example.

Scull: What, in the San Francisco area?

Siegfried Linkwitz was born in Germany in 1935. He received his electrical engineering degree from Darmstadt Technical University prior to moving to California in 1961 to work for Hewlett-Packard. During his early years in the USA, he did postgraduate work at Stanford University. For over 30 years Mr. Linkwitz has developed electronic test equipment ranging from signal generators, to network and spectrum analyzers, to microwave sweepers and instrumentation for evaluating electromagnetic compatibility.

Jonathan Scull: How long have you been making cables, Ulrik?

Ulrik Poulsen: It's actually close to three years now...It's a spinoff from other products we make. Actually, Alpha-Core manufactures magnetic cores and various materials and components for transformers...And we have a daughter company called Tortran that manufactures toroidal transformers. Anyway, five years ago we introduced a new product called Laminax. It's a combination of copper and aluminum with various kinds of dielectrics. This is laminated together continuously in various fashions to produce a material that's used as shielding for EMI and RFI in the electronics industry.