Dynaco was incorporated in October of 55. The transformers were not "cheapened versions" of Acrosound products, unless David Hafler succeeded in scamming the patent office and was lying in his interview with Vacuum Tube Valley. He describes the winding arrangement in detail there and how it differed from the Acrosound products. And Acrosound must have had very little impact; I never heard of them until a few years ago. Some say that Keroes and Hafler parted ways over kits. Who knows for sure now that Hafler ...
"Scamming" the patent office isn't hard.
What I heard was all anecdotal, and I've never read the Vacuum Tube Valley interview. (Is is available on the web?)
Acrosound did have a big impact because their products were the hot stuff to build an amp around in the early '50s. Even Heathkit used them for their Williamson/UltraLinear designs. Hafler probably would not have had the money or reputation to found Dyna if he hadn't been 1/2 of Acrosound.
The Acro x-formers were potted in really nice-looking cans, and people are still using them. (They go for a real premium when they show up used.) Anything that works like new 50 years later gets some respect from me.
Herb Keroes, from all the accounts I've heard, did not want to get into kits. He just wanted to sell superior x-formers. At that time, many people were building from scratch. Heathkit seemed to have kits tied up, although I imagine Knight and Lafayette, and maybe some others did have kits available. Going into competition with Heath took some balls.
The cutting edge products at that time were usually from articles in the magazines. Somewhere I have plans for an amp that my father built using an Acro x-former. It was fully cross-coupled in the front end and driver stages, used gas regulators for these stages, and had a pair of EL37s in PP with Ultralinear. It was a pretty complex beast for the time.
I can only tell you firsthand about the later Dyna SS stuff, but the impression I got of early Dyna, and the impression I had of later Dyna, was that it was a very good value. I don't think anyone regarded it as the best on the market. It didn't become "legendary" until there was a backlash against all of the IHF test "measures great" gear that tin ears like Julian Hirsch were pushing. People started noticing that the old Dyna tube gear didn't screw things up in the same way as much of the SS stuff. We shortly had people talking about TIM and stuff like that, and hi-end audio was reborn.
Audio was still being published at that time, and they seemed to take a fairly balanced view of things. The underground rags sure stirred things up though. I miss Audio.
