RIP, Electric Amplifier Inventor Jim Marshall, 'Father of Loud' 166
asavin writes "The founder of Marshall Amplification, Jim Marshall OBE, has died at the age of 88. A tribute to the man known as the Father of Loud was posted on his official website, praising the man whose name became iconic for electric guitarists." Reader LizardKing points to the Guardian's coverage of Marshall's passing, and adds : "A former drummer, Jim Marshall initially became involved with guitar amplification as an importer of Fender equipment, until he eventually decided to branch out and make his own amps. The trademark Marshall sound evolved alongside the requirements of such luminaries as Pete Townshend and Eric Clapton. The Marshall stack has since become a ubiquitous symbol of live rock music in particular — so much so that some bands perform in front of veritable walls of Marshall branded speakers. In addition to his lead guitar amplifiers, Jim will also be remembered for his great bass amps (as used by Lemmy Kilmister in particular) and the much sought after Guv'nor distortion pedal."
Always used Marshall, always will... (Score:5, Insightful)
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RIP??? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure "Rest In Peace" is appropriate here ;-)
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Yeah, I'd go for something like "REST IN HIGH VOLUME!" followed by several hours of ears ringing like crazy.
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All amps being turned up to "11" of course....
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My boss has an amp that goes to "13".
It was advertised as a feature. ;)
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ROCK in Peace....
Special burial? (Score:2)
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That's a thought. Must amend my will:
To go along with the music requests that include Killed By Death by Motorhead, And no, I'm not joking about the music, as that's what my will really does insist on being played.
Wow! (Score:1)
Should've used Gamemaker. For shame...
Worst thing that ever happened to music. (Score:1)
In my opinion, loudness was the worst thing that ever happened to music.
Pretty much destroyed all good music, and retroactively made many recordings of old music worse. Now that is not all this man's fault and music had to be digital eventually (and with digital comes a volume control). But he seems like the first step in a staircase of inept musical decisions.
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They weren't talking about the loudness war in the raw data of the file, but rather in the final output. Anyway, just saying..
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Yes but they are absolutely related. Different techniques that both similarly diminished the art-form of music by making it louder.
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Yes but they are absolutely related. Different techniques that both similarly diminished the art-form of music by making it louder.
You haven't got the faintest idea what you're talking about. The criticism of the loudness war is concerned with clipping and a lack of dynamic variation thanks to over use of compression, not increased volume per se.
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wisnoskij complained:
There is no comparison to the modern day rock and role singer (some smuck of the street who is willing to scream until he vomits blood) and a professionally trained opera singer who can actually control his voice.
Which is to say that you love opera, and rock music is not opera.
Well, duh.
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Well I have never listened to a single opera. I respect the dedication to improving a skill and professionals who strive to perfect a skill. And I understand that to be a good singer you need to have control of your voice.
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wisnoskij insisted:
Well I have never listened to a single opera. I respect the dedication to improving a skill and professionals who strive to perfect a skill. And I understand that to be a good singer you need to have control of your voice.
And yet you cite opera singing as somehow artistically superior to rock vocals.
Are you familiar with the logical error known as "appeal to authority"? Because you just indulged in it.
As for your contention that:
There is no comparison to the modern day rock and role singer (some smuck of the street who is willing to scream until he vomits blood) and a professionally trained opera singer who can actually control his voice.
I recommend you hunt up the original recording [magnet] of Jesus Christ Superstar, and listen closely to "Gethsemane". The guy singing it is Ian Gillian, the original lead singer of Deep Purple, and thus one of the originators (with Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin) of hard rock/heavy metal voc
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When the most important aspect of a singers voice is how loud they can scream, when they sound like you put a bag or gravel in a food possessor, that is a bag thing.
It is indeed. It's not my bag, it's not your bag, but it's clearly somebody's. Maybe it's my father's; he's just bought one from the shop -- it's brand new, you know.
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There is nothing wrong with loudness in its place. I never said anything over X db is bad.
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stop, he is a troll.
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Everything about your post is provable wrong, or based on a stupid fallacy.
Just the point that you compare anyone who 'sing rock' to a professionally train opera singer show you're inability to think logically.
I can pull out the top best rock and roll singers, and that would have better voice control that some yahoo singing opera in the shower.
Put together a logical argument...but I suspect you can't think clearly enough to put a logical argument together.
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Yes because the loudness war (the movement that reduced the complexity of music by making it all 1 volume level) is provably a good thing?
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Really? You seem to be generating plenty.
Which is nothing at all to do with amplifiers.
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Actually there's a Universe of Bagpipes [hotpipes.com]. Most every nation in Europe had or has an indigenous variety or varieties. Some of these are loud as hell, yes - Scottish (specifically Great Highland, the stuff you hear in parades), Breton, Galician. Others aren't any louder than an acoustic guitar, like the Irish pipes I play.
And curiously enough just this Tuesday I was talking to a friend about the Basie Band's guitarist, Freddy Green, who stuck to using a non-amplified archtop his whole career. Those things
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Yeah, the Who, Stones, Clapton...their loudness just ruined music~
At least we have idiots like you to tell us what music is, and apparently you have defined art. Well done.
Moron.
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In my opinion, loudness was the worst thing that ever happened to music.
Pretty much destroyed all good music, and retroactively made many recordings of old music worse. Now that is not all this man's fault and music had to be digital eventually (and with digital comes a volume control). But he seems like the first step in a staircase of inept musical decisions.
This is completely irrelevant to this discussion. We're not talking about the loudness war here, we're talking about rock music you twit.
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Amazing that one would even attempt to attribute the travesties of the Loudness Wars to one of the pioneers of modern music... I assume you exhibit a similar disdain for the late Les Paul?
You damn kids and your damn pianofortes... (Score:5, Funny)
...and don't get me started on equal temperament!
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Wrong loudness.
The "loudness war" is really a "compression" war. And not data compression, but dynamic range compression (the difference between loud
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Indeed, you are correct. If you look at the signals on an oscilloscope, an overdriven solid state amp will have a square wave with sharp corners, while the corners of a tube amp's distortion (clipped and overdriven) are rounded. This is what people mean when they say it sounds "warmer".
Many guitar players will play through a low power tube amp with a microphone in front of the tube amp that feeds a high power, not overdriven solid state amp. You get the sound of the tube amp without the higher cost of a Mar
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I suspect that if you turn an amplifier up a lot you will also get distortion, which is what the OP is probably trying to say. But bands could easily avoid this, they would spend more money on more expensive amplifiers (such as made by Marshall) and thus get the desired loudness with less distortion.
For the CD "loudness wars" it is too late. You can't improve the result by buying a more expensive CD player. That is a big difference.
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Don't, he is a troll. He complain about 'loudness', and when direct confronted he changes the subject slightly. I mean, think abiout this: the crux of his argument* is that loud equals bad music.
He clearly doesn't understand distortion, or compression artifacts, or any technical aspect. Of course in spite of the clear evidence of hios ignorance, he gfoes on as if he know what he is talking about..
SO he is a troll.
*I use that term very loosely regarding his stupid statements.
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Re:Worst thing that ever happened to music. (Score:4, Insightful)
His amps weren't just about being louder. The tone of Marshall amps is stellar.
But in his defense, Pete Townsend of The Who is the one who demanded louder amps for their concerts. Most amplification systems at concert halls back then were seriously lacking for rock n roll, so you had to have a loud amp. Pete begged Jim to make a louder amp, and he came up with the 100-watt Marshall. Then of course every band wanted one, and I guess you could say there was a concert loudness war for a while (parodied by Spinal Tap's moniker "England's Loudest Band"), but as others have said that had nothing to do with the loudness war of the recorded music (which was indeed detrimental to the music itself).
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Most people don't realise that to double the db you have to increase the amp's power by 10x. A 100 watt amp is twice as loud as a 10 watt amp, all other things being equal. A high efficiency speaker being driven by a 50 watt amp is louder than a low efficiency speaker being driven by a 100 watt amp. The amp output impedance and speaker impedance matter, too. Because of impedance mismatches, you can easily blow a solid state amp by running several speakers in series from it. You might even see the magic smok
Re:Worst thing that ever happened to music. (Score:4, Insightful)
Dad? Is that you? I didn't know you had a computer! Gees, I'm 60 and have been listening to rock and roll since the '60s. If it ain't loud, it ain't rock. If it's too loud, you're too old.
Have you ever been to a Mozart concert? Have you ever heard Tchaikovsky's 1812 overture, with cannons? have you never in your life been to a parade? Loud music has been around for centuries. GOOD loud music. A live acoustic guitar playing with a live drumset is subaudible. Most non-amplified musical instruments, especially horns and drums, are DAMNED loud.
Hell, try listening to Zepplin's "Immigrant Song" at low volume, it's like drinking watered down beer. You've been listening to WAY too much canned music and WAY too little live music.
Re:Worst thing that ever happened to music. (Score:5, Insightful)
Classical music has to be loud, at least sometimes. What makes it difference is that is equality loud and quiet. The classical song writers understood the significance and beauty of a whisper as much as that of the bang of the cannon. Modern music is the exact opposite, it is 1 volume (loud).
And considering that you where alive, let alone going to concerts in the 60s you are orders of magnitude older then I am. Good taste is ageless.
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But the subject was amplification, not dynamics. It isn't Marshall's fault that today's sound engineers seem to all be less than competent.
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He's a troll. Ignore him.
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I'm turning my amp up to 11... (Score:2)
Rock on, Jim...rock on.
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That's nothing - if you want to do something really fun, try plugging the output of one amp into the input of another. (*note - keep a fire extinguisher handy)
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The "father of loud" (Score:5, Interesting)
By the end of the 1960s, rock amps had achieved enough power to reach the threshold of pain. From then on, much of the "wall of amps" thing was fake. [gizmodo.com] You just didn't need that much speaker area to hit the threshold of pain.
A friend of mine was a roadie for metal groups years ago, and she discovered this when setting up for Metallica. Most of the "amps" were empty boxes. At least they were enclosed boxes. In the picture above, the low-budget metal band just used fake fronts.
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There's also a reason why the Dead's "Wall of Sound" didn't last long. Two semi-trailer loads of audio equipment leap frogging across the nation, and a mixing board and wiring so cantankerous that a short in a single portion would render the entire system inoperative? Yeah.
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A friend of mine was a roadie for metal groups years ago, and she discovered this when setting up for Metallica.
Speed of Sound tour? Let me guess, they were a bunch of assholes?
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Has said friend's career slowed down lately, too?
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Yeah... I saw a play the other day, and the house these people lived in was missing an entire wall.
Was that house in a Potemkin village, perchance?
...luminaries as Pete Townshend and Eric Clapton.. (Score:1)
Huh? No mention of Hendrix? Seriously Sad.
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British Amps, British Rockers.
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"Did you want a list of all the eleven gazillion people who ever used a Marshall amp? "
Only those who used one which goes to eleven.
Can anybody tell me (Score:2)
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If you like the sound of early Van Halen, that was a 100watt Plexi model (albeit run through a variac and -possibly (though it's contested) modded some).
RIP Jim Marshall, rock would not have been the same without you. I give you a moment of
Re:Can anybody tell me (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, fine, but what is that (Marshall) sound? That's tough to pin down. It's like trying to describe the difference between "red" and "blue". They're both colors but they are decidedly different. FWIW, the Fender amps of that era were prone to a certain kind of distortion when driven at all hard. This the very characteristic that is prized to this day by blues guitarists who use it as just another part of their style. The problem Marshall solved was that there were limits on how loud you could make an amp with those characteristics before that distortion lost it's unique charm. To be sure, the Marshall gear had it's own type of "crunch" but it could be delivered at much higher levels before turning ugly.
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No, not really. You need to play guitar and hear and feel the way your music comes out of a Marshall vs. a VOX or a Yamaha.
Much like the great Gretch sound, you can't really explain it to someone in words they'll understand.
I can tell you that a Marshall is richer and has that classic tube sound where the peaks and valleys don't seem chopped off which makes your brighter tones a lot brighter and your bass notes a lot darker and fuller, but what does that even mean?
You just have to listen.
Real Live Amp Sound (Score:2)
I feel almost ashamed to say that as a 30 year old man, music teacher, and classically trained musician, it wasn't until just last weekend that I heard REAL live guitar amps, performed in a hall by expert musicians, without any other sound reinforcement.
I had been to many, many rock concerts, but they all fed the sound through the PA system, and though it sounded good, it was nothing like I heard in the hall last weekend. Just two small floor guitar amps, one on each side of the hall. The stereo effect was
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I don't even know where I'm going to find more performances like that.
Most bars I listen to live music in don't have PA systems, so every band is like that. Of course, they have to have the settings right and actually be good musicians.
You're 30 so you're a child of the digital era. You simply can NOT get very high fidelity from a CD. Few LPs would anyone confuse with a live performance, either, but there were some, Van halen's first album comes to mind.
When they have insanely high sampling rates and much h
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Actually, just pre-amp distortion is an anonymous fuzzy sound that sounds the same in almost all amps. It doesn't help that just about anyone uses the ubiquitous 12AX7 preamp tube.
It's the poweramp distortion that creates the unique character. The 6L6 tubes in Fender amps deliver a different sound than EL34 tubes (which, if I'm not mistaken, are still the power tubes in Marshalls).
And then there is the electrical feedback from the output transformer and the speakers that influence the poweramp distortion, w
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The best way that I can explain this is how the whole system is made. One big distinction is tube vs solid state amps. When operating any amp in compression, it will generate harmonics. (think of the difference between a sine wave vs a square wave when looking at the frequency spectrum). If you add multiple sine waves (ie a chord on a guitar). Each frequency for each note of the chord will mix together when going through the amp, which are called intermodulation products. These intermod products give a certain profile to the sound that come out of the amplifier that give each amp its own unique sound. The differences come from the design of the amp. Many people claim that tubes give a 'warmer' sound from the better intermods that they create. This is probably true, but I don't have any evidence one way or the other. It would make sense that the transition from linear to nonlinear (ie approaching saturation) in a tube amp would be different vs a solid state amp which will affect the harmonic creation. Another way that the sound is different would be what kind of speaker cabinet the amplifier is connected to. The acoustic performance will also shape the sound.
In simple terms, overdriven tube amplifier circuits generate more odd-order harmonics (3rd, 5th, 7th) and overdriven solid-state circuits tend to generate more even-order harmonics (2nd, 4th, 6th). Odd-order harmonics are much more "musical" and pleasant to listen to. Even-order harmonics sound like a chainsaw going thru a metal garbage can full of cats. (not that there's anything wrong with that) Compare the guitar tones of Hendrix and Dimebag. The difference is obvious.
Over the years, devices have been
Should be restrictions (Score:1)
Loudspeakers are all and well, but no-one under the age of 30 should be allowed to own one. Especially not my neighbors.
I guess.. (Score:2)
He finally went up to 11..
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The next time they give me 15 mod points, I'll just let them expire and we'll pretend your comment got all of them (in a good way).
Bad title. (Score:5, Informative)
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So what?
No one lusts after a Fender amp, they want a Marshall.
He did it right.
Yeah, that's why pawnshops everywhere are full of early '60s Fender amps gathering dust.
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At the moment the highest price I see on eBay for an old Fender amp is $7,850 for a 1956 Super. I'd call that lust. And vintage Marshalls are actually cheaper, huh.
PRS Amps (Score:2)
http://www.prsguitars.com/se50/ [prsguitars.com]
A 50 watt PRS amp that is amazing. He had played Marshalls and Mesas for years, but this PRS is incredible.
Well, we still have Hartley Peavey (Score:2)
When he's gone, I will mourn Hartley Peavey as much as I do Les Paul, Leo Fender, and Jim Marshall.
Silly maybe but an example (Score:2)
Re:Make his own? (Score:5, Informative)
What does it mean?
Well, he owned a music store and was selling Fender amps from America. He took them apart and inspected them and figured he could make them cheaper and sell them for a better profit in England than he could by importing them from America. He used British variations of tubes that gave his amps a different sound than Fender amps. He happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right product.
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So, was he an innovator or a Steve Jobs?
Re:Make his own? (Score:4, Insightful)
A Steve Jobs, but humble.
Re:Make his own? (Score:5, Insightful)
What does it mean?
Well, he owned a music store and was selling Fender amps from America. He took them apart and inspected them and figured he could make them cheaper and sell them for a better profit in England than he could by importing them from America. He used British variations of tubes that gave his amps a different sound than Fender amps. He happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right product.
And that's in a time before someone who had never made an amplifier in their life would turn up with a patent for "amplification giving a pleasing sound" and taking both fender and Marshall to court.
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What it means is that the Marshall 1959 schematic looks identical to the schematic for a Fender '59 bassman...just sayin'
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The irony is how much we now pay in America for his British amps! Ouch.
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Same thing happened in Canada, Peter Traynor [traynoramps.com] was an amp repairman in Toronto who essentially copied the Fender Bassman design (much like Jim Marshall did) with just enough mods to keep from being sued, but while adding some innovations of durability. The Traynor Dyna-bass, later renamed the Bassmaster, was designed and tested so it could survive being thrown off the roof of the original 3-storey Long & McQuade music store building, and still work by just replacing the tubes.
While Marshall innovated on
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I hate these media "rags to riches" stories. They make it sound like the guy went to Radio Shack (when it was for hobbyists), locked himself in his garage, and popped out a millionaire.
Well, that was a long time ago, and analog amplification isn't exactly rocket science.
Re:Make his own? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Making a good analog amp isn't especially difficult. What is difficult is doing it a cost that allows it to be retailed profitably. There are tons of absolutely killer boutique amp builders out there making great stuff that'll blow away pretty much anything mass-market (including marshall), but your're paying $4k+ for that sort of thing.
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Making a good analog amp isn't especially difficult. What is difficult is doing it a cost that allows it to be retailed profitably. There are tons of absolutely killer boutique amp builders out there making great stuff that'll blow away pretty much anything mass-market (including marshall), but your're paying $4k+ for that sort of thing.
There are a lot of people building their own amps these days, from "boutique" amp builders that charge exorbitant prices and use exotic/specialty and select "new old-stock" original parts & tubes, to fairly average guitarists that want a quality hand-built tube amp but lack the money to afford a Marshall or a boutique amp.
I've been playing for ~40 years, and my favorite, best-sounding amps are the ones I've built.
Cathode-Biased KT66s, Parallel-Triode preamp, ~30 watts: http://s62.photobucket.com/albums/ [photobucket.com]
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I have a Line6 Pod 2 [line6.com] which sounds really damn close to a Marshal stack, specially through headphones. The Line6 stuff usually does a much better job at emulating analog gear than Beringher, whose products i always found way to sterile sounding.
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No, it isn't more difficult then building a rocket..assume you want the rocket to do somewhere and do something.
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Let me get this right: building a good analog amp is hard because you can't make a digital one sound like an analog one?
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Are you talking about Bob Carver?
What seems easy for him is inconceivable to an average engineer.
Why does it seem like he keeps getting screwed by his business partners?
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No, I was just talking in general terms about any number of boutique/hand wired amps, ranging from relatively high-volume companies like Soldano to super-exclusive stuff like Dumble, where it's one guy making maybe one amp a month.
Re:Make his own? (Score:4, Insightful)
"It's actually pretty simple if you know what you're doing."
No shit.
Is there anything that isn't easy for you know what your doing?
Re:Make his own? (Score:4, Insightful)
Chill out bro. Keep tryin' to b a millionaire. Now you didn't say what you did or what your angle on the market was .. but it's been always well known that hard work alone isn't enough -- you need good ideas, a marketing strategy that works, and smart practices. If wealth was based solely on how much hard work you do, people working at a fast food place or on a farm would be earning double what a CEO makes.
Anyway, ..according to wikipedia .. this guy owned a record store .. he understood music .. and people had told him there was a need for a decent amp .. so he formed a company .. hired some engineers .. and produced one.
Btw, most of the time.. by the time the Chinese copy your invention .. you'd have presumably made a chunk of money already (or how else would they know your invention even exists .. let alone that its worth manufacturing).
As for "little guys who made it work" .. there are plenty of millionaires that made smartphone apps -- individuals who had good ideas, implemented them the correct way, and worked hard -- with almost no money or capital investment. Also your cloning theory is false. How come twitter clones didnt make it? Twitter is a fairly simple website that wouldn't have been difficult for any of the big boys to duplicate .. same thing with youtube. Anyway .. just cause you failed 3 times doesn't mean you should give up.. many people failed a lot more times than that before they made it.
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That's the big ingredient that always gets left out in those stories. The hard work, keen sense of what's hot, and a strong business sense will all make the big success more likely, but then you need a whopping big dose of luck.The luck is the only absolutely indispensable element.
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Yes he did. He invented an amplifier to get a specific sound musicians.
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Yeah, but that Porsche was the son of the son of the founder of the company.