A message from George about his early years Now I am going to talk about myself a little and some of the reasons I have always loved music and electronics. I always tell about being in the second grade, wandering around the school yard during lunch recess, going around the corner of a building and walking into the path of a baseball bat being swung full tilt. I explain that I received a frontal lobotomy with a Louisville Slugger and started to build radios. But in fact I was already involved with learning radio and electronics from before I can remember. At least I have a good excuse, then I will turn to the person I am talking to and ask, what’s your excuse! My first DIY project was out of a 1954 Mechanics Illustrated article on how to build a one transistor, one diode radio receiver, using a coil built on a toilet paper roll, I made this thing and it worked. I bought the parts at a little Radio TV repair shop just two blocks from my home. The owner a Don Wickersham saw my interest and taught me much about electronics. He must have felt sorry for me because he gave me the rest of the parts I needed to build this thing. After school I started to hang out at his shop, he had me first repair the old radios then onto TVs and then with the Electronic Organs. I learned a lot from him and sad to say he has passed on, but not before he had passed on much of his wisdom and knowledge. After building that first radio I made the statement that transistors will never replace the vacuum tubes as it did not have enough gain to pull in the stations I wanted to hear 80 some miles away. Next I built a bunch of one and two stage amplifiers using battery tubes because transistors were the rage and those tube sets were just being thrown away. By 1960 I was designing my own amplifiers and by 1961 my own receivers, I also studied a DeVry Electronics course, one of my dads friends had taken and brought all the study materials home. I really studied Color Television Broadcast, including the NTSC, Pal and Secam systems and at the age of 15, was the youngest Color TV repairman in history at that time, as far as I knew. I had to have someone older drive me to people’s homes to repair their TVs and they would ask me why doesn’t my father come and repair their sets. I would laugh and tell them he wasn’t my dad and they didn’t want them in their house because he would stay in the car drinking, then they would shut up and let me fix their sets. Ah, the good old days, of working over a hot soldering gun smelling soldering flux fumes drift up my nose! I worked at several shops and when I was a senior in high school I worked after school and weekends at TV repair shops and after that at a local Music store. I learned how to tune pianos, repair musical instruments and had built up my record collection as that is how I got paid in those days. So I appreciate what a music note sounds like and am very critical on how it is reproduced. Being as I was designing and building my own amplifiers, receivers and other electronic devices, I merged the two together to work as well as possible to design and build equipment that sounded as life like as modern electronics could produce. One area I am very picky on is power amplifiers, even though I am known for the phono preamps I build, and while I build different types of both single end, push pull and even OTL headphone amplifiers, my favorite type is always pure triode designs. This goes back to working with Don, going out to the churches to work on these older electronic organs such as the Wurlitzer and Hammond products, both with amplified mechanical tone generators and listening to those great push pull parallel 2A3 power amplifiers producing the lowest registers of the foot pedals and how good those old systems worked. Many of these still had the original 2A3’s in them and at that time some 30 years latter they still sounded great. That is why I built the AU-15 transformer coupled 2A3 push pull 15 watt power amplifier. Now the AU-15 is a great product, I took a pair of these to one of my California dealers to try out and at first they didn’t want to hear another tube amp as they had a lot on their floor. After a while they decided to hear them and they tried to put them to shame, they hooked them to a pair of large Magapans and turned them on. The wife was sitting in her office, walked out and said, “We will take them” and then she sat down and listened for a long while. The wife is the organist at her church and the husband is also a concert pianist. I myself could not believe how well they worked with those power hungry speakers, but they handled them very well. It is funny that they had the Maggie’s hooked up to some 100 watt SET tube amplifier would show off the system and the 15’s sounded much better. My new AU-70 is a power house of vacuum tube amplification, it is detailed, clean and dynamic. I only have five of these out there right now but I'm working on getting more of these into production. Everyone who has heard and bought these are amazed on how powerful and realistic these preform. So much for the sales part, back to the technical part, I spent my life working in the repair, design and quality control areas of electronics. I am a troubleshooter by nature and I do not like to repair what I design, so I am careful. My last day job was working in the IT depart of a school district on computers, audio and video systems design and repairs. Along with design of all the sound systems and cabling requirements of the new schools, auditoriums and stadiums I help save the district a lot of money by eliminating the sound consultants. Before that I worked for many years as a video camera technician along with camcorders and VCR’s for consumer and broadcast customers, but audio has been my passion. So I started Wright Sound Company after going with a friend to an audio club and hearing what was being presented as good vacuum tube equipment. I said I can do a lot better than that and that’s my story and I’m sticking to it! George Wright the third.