A couple of comments...
When Bud Fried died, a close personal friend purchased the company from Bud's wife and tried to keep the enterprise going. But he was unable to do so. At the same time, he didn't want his friend's endeavor to die either. So he and an associate looked around for someone who was already building transmission line designs and could work with series crossovers. They approached us and after months of discussing it, we agreed to work with them.
In reality, we have spent a good deal of time, money and energy promoting the Bud Fried line. Bud Fried sold through dealers and it was decided that we should do the same since there were a number of dealers who were interested in carrying the brand. There are currently a few active dealers who order on a fairly regular basis. (If there is no dealer in your area, we can purchase them directly through
www.friedaudio.com.)
If you sell through dealers, you cannot sell direct (without compensating the dealer in whose territory the speaker was sold). You would be competing with your dealers. So we can't promote the Bud Fried line on our web site. It must be run as a separate entity. What's more, even if we could, we wouldn't. That would be unfair to our partners as someone who came to the site looking for Bud Fried speakers might end up purchasing one of our models instead.
There have been many technical advances since the days when Bud developed his very successful models. And no one can know how Bud would go about developing new models today. We tried to keep as close to what we thought Bud would do, but in those cases where better options existed, we thought he would probably decide to go with the better option. For example, we modeled a traditional tapered TL line (as Bud would have used) and also modeled an MLQWT design (that Bud would not have been aware of). When the latter modeled better, we went in that direction. But in areas like serial crossovers, we tried to remain true to what Bud would have done.
Dick Olsher of The Absolute Sound, as I recall, was a close personal friend of Bud's and reviewed a number of his speakers over the years. Dick also authored a very positive review of the Bud Fried Towers we designed. While some might quibble with some of the design decisions we made, Dick found no fault with them. I think that says all that needs to be said.
- Jim