Quote:
Originally Posted by barretter
It seems that WAL was transferred to Elstone Electronics by 1963 (the Studio Sound advert) and Elstone Electronics had been taken over by AC Farnell by 1966 at the latest. Presumably Farnell gave up manufacturing electronic devices and got J.E. Sugden to produce a new version of the WAL Gain but the crucial questinm is when? The J.E. Sugden C51 preamp didn't come out until 1969. A.R. Sugden (manufacturer of the Connoisseur turntable) was a complelely different company.
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Although the C51 had a prior life as the C41, under the Richard Allan name, this having been announced in 1968 April, along with the A21 integrated amplifier and A41 power amplifier.
Sugden seemed to have been particularly interested the matching and equalizing of pickup cartridges at an individual model level, as evidenced by his fairly well-known article in Hi Fi News for 1968 April, “Flatten Your Head”. The individual cartridges mentioned therein also appear in the C51 data as being catered for by special input circuit arrangements. I suspect that it was the same for the C41. Inclusion of the A.R. Sugden Connoisseur cartridge in that list may have been an artefact of the “Yorkshire Triangle”. Anyway, one could say that c.1968, Sugden was well-positioned to design and supply a third-party disc/mic/tape preamplifier, and that one might expect such to include some of its own thinking as to how this task should be addressed.
In the absence of other evidence, the circumstantial case points to 1968 as the introduction date for the Sugden-built WAL preamplifier, but it might have preceded the C41, so 1967 is not outruled.
Cheers,