[Ron Stimpson]

Wow, I forgot that was even still out there. It is an interesting story actually (well, in hindsight... at the time it was just a couple of people with clearly much more time on their hands than today ;^)

Most of the work on that DIY project was done late 97/98 and it just took till 1999 to get Secrets to publish it (I think Ralph there hooked me up with some guys who had some thoughts about "particle board versus MDF" or something arcane like that). By '99 SVS was well into the planning stages, and indeed much of the study that went into that sub, and several that followed (or ones Tom was building in Ohio) provided the impetus for eventually forming an LLC, finalizing designs etc, finding someone who could afford to lose $20K or so we figured it might take to help fund seed materials, that sort of thing. Erik Kroner was the guy that was the "sucker" for providing much of that seed money. ;^).

As for the interesting brands crossing paths, back in the day it was tough to find good, affordable long throw woofers with known T/S parameters. Both Tom and I used dozens of brands in those early years (even then I was usually working with "OPM" or, "other people's money" since I couldn't afford to just by woofers for no reason. So I built and sold a couple subs to folks that wanted them (always explaining that someone that actually knew what he was talking about figured out the acoustical alignments for me). I know this stirred conspiracy theorists, but Hsu sold bare woofers (maybe they still do, don't know) and it just happened to be what ended up in that one project. Through my own stupidity (you have to know Tom did all the math for me on the tuning of those long 4" ports) I ended up smoking the voice coil on that sub using some extended sine wave testing, and after collecting dust for a couple years, sold it with a first generation 12" SVS woofer that was a non-standard photo sample.

The form factor was almost an accident. Once Tom convinced me how much internal volume I needed to get flat to 19hz or so (my goal at the time) and the fact it had to be an "end table" to fit the room (small rental in Northern VA, I was assigned to the Pentagon at the time) the 24" cylinder was pretty much dictated to get the airspace. I'd heard Hsu had had a similar shaped sub but had never seen one, and since even then I knew this would be a "one off" it hardly mattered except for how it looked and worked (obviously I didn't care what it looked like on the bottom, God, that's embarrassing but we're talking hand tools from Sears to do this project. Now SVS owns CNC lathes and mills, times change ;^). I actually used a dual VC Parts Express 12" for some listening sessions, but one 300 watt channel into the single Hsu 12" woofer modeled better on "Winspeak" so I kept that instead. One cylinder configuration I did for my father (more "OPM") had twin 10" drivers from "Madisound" IIRC. Having done end caps for cylinders (which were bad enough if you have ever seen how much dust MDF cutting kicks up) I knew I wasn't going to even try to build boxes till I could figure out a way to get someone else to build the enclosures. ;^)

The referenced sub worked pretty well, as it turned out. Quite a few mistakes and some rather crude router skills meant I started on a much nicer looking design (again with Tom's help) that used 16" tubing, kept the downfiring config but added a baseplate (the big "end table" design tended to "hop" a bit because the woofer was off center to clear the port exit and thus wasn't weighted evenly). The fact I had an old Soundcraftsmen stereo amp meant I had power for two subs anyway. IIRC that 16" cylinder used either one VC of the PE driver or an Adire 12" (another of the few quality woofers DIY'ers could readily get in the 90's). That worked well enough that we considered using Adire (called something else then I think) as our woofer supplier but realized we'd have fewer conflicts if we just designed our own (which we did with a company called FRC). Eventually we went "vertical" with our own design AND in-house woofer fabrication, a process virtually complete with the imminent arrival of our new Ultra-13 this year.

By late-98 Tom and I had already collaborated on a self-powered 16" down-firing cylinder with a 250 watt plate amp built in to what became the prototype "Powered Cylinder" design. If not for Tom's ability to crunch the "cost to build" numbers showing somehow, we could actually make a profit doing these in bulk (and again, the math matching cylinder space, driver parameters, amp and port tuning) SVS sure as never could have taken off.

It was a true team effort, even before there was any clear goal other than to build better subs for less money than anything we could buy at the time. If there was a "eureka moment" it was when we simply realized by selling unique designs with direct "Buy Now" links on a site (thus creating your retail outlet) and keeping low overhead with production (literally in a big garage and barn Tom owned for the first couple years) it might actually work to help support our A/V upgrading habits. Few, if any, factory-direct OEMs were doing sales on an automated basis yet (with credit card approvals, linked products to a shopping cart etc). , Amazon.com hadn't been doing it that long back in 1999. People today forget just how novel webstores were a mere 10 years ago. Plenty of brands had sites, but even then they typically involved "call to order" or simple "contact us for more" approaches.

Keep in mind this was all happening RIGHT when half the western world was in the process of losing its collective shirts due to the "Dot Com" bubble busting, and Internet companies going broke on a daily basis. There were few times we didn't think we we would be next during that first year. Every one of us (there were four primary owners) had at least one, some of us two, credit cards fully maxed out with minimum payments being made. But we ended our first year in the black (working for free certainly helped the balance sheet), personal debts paid off, and one by one we quit our "day jobs" to work SVS full time. I think I was the last. (Had to hit the 20yr mark with the Army so I could secure that fine socialized medical care you have all read about recently). It's not like SVS was paying medical costs back then. Now it's a big chunk of our budget, along with profit sharing for employees, like a regular company almost ;^).

In fact that first year or two nearly every dime of SVS went back to buying more, and better components, and designing better models of subs, without even drawing salary. It's called "sweat equity" I think ;^) The first production subs (passive only, the Powered Cylinders followed quickly though) went out the door in June of 2000 IIRC, so we're about to enter our 8th year of actually shipping products, despite being a company well prior to that day. Now into several world markets, with continually evolving subs and now speakers it's been quite exciting. And humbling. We're in tens of thousands of homes all over the world. Pictures on a driveway can lead to places you never expected.

We've slipped a few projects but haven't missed too many launches, and I can say without question that 2007's roll-out of the new Ultra lines, and yes, the MTS-01 family of speakers into the Americas, Europe, Asia and elsewhere will have largely completed the first full-circle evolution of SVS in just under 10 years. With subs spanning $400 to $3,000 (when the Ultra/2 returns) at least and speaker packages that pair well with them and compete with the best in the world, as we face our second 10 years we'll mostly be concerned with ensuring customer service, our website and associated products all keep pace with the simple idea that gave birth to SVS in the first place -- namely, being as good or better as the best in the world, for competitive prices with customer service to match.

Someday we'll write it all down. Suffice it to say nobody goes it alone in the audio industry. Not me, not Tom, not any of the dozens of employees and sub-contractors we now consider part of the SVS family. You draw inspiration from all around you, invent new ideas to solve old problems, and always always do the right thing for the customer. We live by the credo, "if you don't take care of your customers, someone else will". The first primordial dust of SVS was evident in that article, but the span of influences, and time go even further back than it might indicate at first read.

Ultimately again, it's satisfied customers that make or break a web-based audio OEM. You either "walk the walk" or you don't. And if you don't, or you stop doing it if you ever DID do it, then you aren't long for this web-based world. We are blessed with the finest customers IN the world, and there's not a day where we take our success or their loyalty for granted.

Best regards from all of us at SVS,

Ron Stimpson