Some people seem a bit hung up about giving credit where credit is due regarding loudspeaker designs. For those people here's a history lesson.....
This should probably be subtitled 'it's not called cloning/copying if you created the original concept'.....
In the mid to late 1970's there was a speaker designer and builder named William Keith Kennedy (Bill to his friends). He lived in the foothills west of Denver, Colorado. One of the places Bill's designs were sold was a high-end audio store in Boulder, Colorado. I worked at that high-end store along side a young weird ex-rock & roll musician from east Texas (just for fun let's call him 'Jon').
As one would imagine, a high-end audio store in university towns attracts it's far share of groupies. A groupie of our particular store was a very young undergrad studying physics. His name was and is Charlie Hansen (note his friends call him Charlie, not Charles).
Now back to Bill Kennedy. He was a kindly man with a eye for raw talent. So he decided to take my co-worker, (Jon what's his name) under his wing, and mentor him in the manly art and science of loudspeaker design.
Among other things, Bill and Jon created a rather interesting test bed for evaluating speakers. It was a pair of 350 lb black monolithic multi-way loudspeakers. The monoliths had extremely thick enclosures. Including massively thick, highly angular front baffles, faceted for diffraction control. (anything about this sound familiar?)
After Bill's untimely death, Jon moved the monoliths to his home and continued the evolution of the design concept embracing the fundamentals learned from Bill Kennedy.
In the mid 1980's Jon decided that marriage was in his future. Unfortunately the wife to be wasn't in love with the black monoliths, so they were given to who? Yes, Charlie Hansen.
For a time Charlie worked as a electronics tech at a company where Jon was the chief engineer. And during that time Charlie learned a fair amount about speaker design from Jon.
Charlie took the major design concepts from the black monoliths and added some interesting ideas of his own. All these concepts fused when Charlie and a group of backers formed Avalon Acoustics. While at Avalon, Charlie created the Ascent and Eclipse, the designs from which all other Avalon speakers evolved.
(longtime readers of Stereophile will remember an interview with Charlie where he spoke about the black monoliths, and their impact on his future designs. Unfortunately here was a bit of brain fade regarding their true origin) To his credit Charlie has publicly acknowledged Jon as the "grandfather" of the Avalon designs. Jon's not so sure the term grandfather fits his self image...
So when looking at the current Avalon designs and seeing that picture of Neil Patel on the Avalon website, people might consider what others contributed to the designs......
