“At 12 years old, I wanted to know how a speaker worked and what caused that, in turn, to operate all the way down to the receiving end of the signal at the antenna and everything in between. That led me to build a crystal radio with no batteries, just the electromagnetic energy from the transmission origin. I used a so-called cat whisker and crystal to detect and rectify an audible signal. It wasn’t practical and because of the low energy, could only drive a small earpiece at low volume. Not exactly hi-fi. From there, I adapted my design with the use of vacuum tubes from other radios and cobbled together first, an amplification stage and second, a capacitive tuner. With that, I could listen to radio stations on a speaker and have the ease of a tuner, however, again, nowhere near high fidelity. I kept plugging along with various concepts to achieve better sound through development and hard work. Which brings me to where I am now.”