Okay guys here's what is going on.
I am starting a new company that will manufacture a line of electronics. I am doing this as a partnership with Gary Dodd. It will be a 25% to 75% partnership. The point of all of this is to get Gary Dodd back up on his feet financially. I will be handling financing the company, promoting, sales, shipping, etc. Orders will be filled promptly and customers will be charged for them as they ship. So expect the same customer service that you normally get from GR Research. For my commitment of my time and finances I am looking for a 25% return for moneys invested (I'm the 25% partner). The remaining 75% will go straight to Gary Dodd.
Gary also has about six more people that he owes some product to. Most of these are orders that he took prior to going into the hospital or right after. Gary was not able to fill those orders due to physical and financial hardship. So this new endeavor should allow Gary to earn the capital necessary to fill those back orders. Gary has been working on that back order list and has already taken care of three people that he owed product to. So if you are one of those guys that Gary owes something to please hang in there. I am trying to help get him into a better financial situation that will allow him to get you taken care of.
What we intend is to launch a whole product line of very high quality, all made in the US products, in nice CNC milled aluminum chassis's. The whole line will be battery powered and run on external 12 volt sources. We are also shooting for keeping each piece of gear in the lower price ranges and under $1,000 for each piece of gear. Basically an assault on the budget market with high end performance.
We have been doing a lot of testing and listening comparisons and feel real good about the product line.
We will have a small chip based, four channel amplifier. It will output 25 watts of clean power into each channel and can output to all four channels at once. Two channels are full range and two will be high pass filtered to be about 6db down at 20Hz using a first order slope. So the filtered channels will be ideal for small speakers, or speaker combos like the Wedgies where a full range signal is not needed. Being off the grid these amps are dead quiet. And high quality wire and connectors from Cardas and even tube connectors are used throughout. This amp sounds incredible. I think we can even offer it in the $599 to $699 range.
We're also offering a tube based pre-amp with two inputs and two outputs. This is based off of the highly praised Dodd battery powered pre-amp. I think we can bring this in at the $899 to $999 price range. Upgrades of the tube, caps, and resistors will also be made available to allow it to compete head to head with anything at any price point.
We will also offer an integrated version of the pre-amp with the built in four channel 25 watt chip amp output. That one might have to retail close to the $1,200 range.
We have been working on a DAC too. I think we can set a new benchmark here for DAC's under $1,000 and give anything under $10,000 a real run. It is that good. It is a USB only DAC. I won't get into the numbers right now or all the latest catch words of what it does. It does it. I look forward to loaning them out for demo. I think we can bring it in at or around the $799 range.
After we get rolling on all of that we are following them with some battery powered tube amps. Gary got creative again and came up with something original that really sounds great. We are using one of the smaller chip amps as the front end (since they are so clean, quiet, fast, detailed, and musical) to drive a pair of tubes. It makes a solid 40 watts on batteries. These will be mono-blocks. And the unique design has no capacitors in the signal path. The result is the best qualities of a small chip amp with the power and lushness of tubes. These are going to be really special. We can also make a four tube version that will output a solid 80 watts.
So I need to come up with a new company name. You guys are always great at naming stuff. So what are your thoughts. Please keep in mind these targets or aspects for the name. By offering a taste of the high end market to the budget market segment we will be trying to reach out to a younger crowd that hasn't yet experienced the high end segment of the market. So in a sense we are trying to revive the industry and at the same time it is a revival of designer and engineer Gary Dodd. So I keep thinking about calling it Revive. I am not sure how well that will grab a younger market though.
What do you guys think for a name?
