(4 of 6) Disappearance of John Iverson
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(C) 1994 THE ABSOLUTE SOUND. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Not one word of this article may be reprinted without the written
permission of the publisher.
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PART 4 OF 6
TAS Journal
Special Report
The Strange Life and
Bizarre Disappearance of
John Iverson
Another version of the same tale, also unverified, is told by his
brother. It makes no mention of the ill-fated test launch, but
confirms the existence of the missile guidance system, a stained,
cracked photograph of which was obtained by TAS . In this version
of the tale, knowledge of Iverson's school project somehow gets back
to the authorities at Hughes-who may have suspected espionage.
John is eventually paid a visit at home by the FBI, who insist on a
full set of plans before leaving with the device and documents in
hand. However, Dan Seifert, Iverson's friend and one-time employee,
recalls seeing the nose-cone-shaped stack of circuit boards in
Iverson's possession in the early 1970s, and hearing John's
declaration that "he had tested it and had proved to his satisfaction
that it worked."
At some point in the early 1970s, Iverson segued into the
audio business, where he eventually formed his own company after a
stint at Marantz. At the time, the venerable firm was still owned by
the Tuchinsky family, who had founded SuperScope. It was short-
lived. "John's story is that he was too revolutionary for them," says
Seifert. "Their story was that he couldn't be controlled." Indeed. By
his early 20s, he had grown into a kind of renegade genius the likes
of which the industry hadn't really seen before. Though the baby
boomer children of the sixties would eventually deliver a handful of
iconoclastic designers who partied hard and took no prisoners,
neither the High End-nor anyone else, apparently-was prepared for
the likes of John Iverson. He was foul-mouthed, always "right," and
made no effort to hide his drinking or party habits. He had a well-
known penchant for guns, and was not beyond flashing a piece now
and then. And when all else failed, he knew how to use his fists.
Beyond the audio arena, he liked cars and motorcycles, which he
drove fast. He was also an avid inventor who, even before his
appearance in the High End, had built, among other things, his missile
guidance system and a carburetor which he claimed would deliver
45 miles to the gallon in his 1965 Buick.
He also spent long hours over several years during the late
1970s trying to perfect a mechanism to prove that the forces of
attraction and repulsion found in permanent magnets could be
harnessed for a kind of perpetual motion machine. Many people saw
the elaborate and finely machined device, which was to use a series
of spinning magnetic armatures hooked to a gear train. "It was so
complicated, you had to wonder where he dreamed up this thing,"
Seifert recalls. "It was really impressive."
His passion for tinkering didn't wane over the years, and in the
two years prior to his disappearance, he had created one of his most
remarkable inventions, at a total cost of about $65,000. Dubbed the
Toodler, it was a go anywhere all-terrain vehicle with independent
hydraulic motors on each wheel. It had a joint in the middle that
allowed it to make incredibly sharp turns, and it could even spin in
place. It could also climb extremely steep inclines, as Doug Iverson
learned one day as John drove it up the steps in the pool area behind
the house at 1770 South Palo Verde, concrete crumbling beneath the
wheels. It was the Toodler that Iverson and Sherwood had used for
collecting the wire in the desert the night they were arrested.
None of these wild inventions ever brought Iverson a stitch of wealth
or fame. But in the High End, he made a name for himself that was,
for a time at least, unparalleled in the business.
Pushing The Sonic Envelope
The years spanning the mid-1970s were surely Iverson's glory days
as he began touting a series of his own products, including some bona
fide breakthroughs. As an audio designer, he was the real thing in an
industry full of wannabees, according to peers. "A lot of people in the
High End are not designers, but techs who became heads of
companies who never did anything but copy something and make a
package," says John Curl, himself a trailblazer with his early solid-
state designs. "John was a very fine engineer, one of the best."
Iverson's approach, say other designers, was to take conventional
parts-for example, bipolar transistors as opposed to FETs-and wring
every last bit out of them with clever topologies that drove them
hard but kept distortion low. "His designs were conservative, but he
was very knowledgeable about what components could do, and very
good at making them perform considerably better than their book
specs," says Andy Hefley, who worked with Iverson at one point and
went on to help found Great American Sound in the mid-1970s with
James Bongiorno.
"He was extremely opinionated and extremely powerful as an
individual," recalls designer Bascom King. King was the star
electronics designer for Infinity, working with the company on its
early FET and servo amp attempts, as well as the working end of its
gargantuan IRS woofer monoliths. He and Iverson became friends
after the two had a "shoot-out" in a hi-fi salon where both had
products on display. "He had an incredible mind, but he had an
attitude," says King. "This industry is full of big egos, and he was one
of them. But he could sure make things sound good."
Nevertheless, Iverson's first High End products were not the
amplifiers for which he later became known, but a grouping of three
dynamic loudspeakers sold directly to stores under the brand name
Omega. The largest model was known for its prodigious bass,
provided by two 12-inch woofers stiffened with a white glue
concoction the designer called Moose Snot.
His sales pitch, circa 1972, consisted of walking into a store,
bragging loudly about his speakers, then insisting they be
demonstrated with his own homebrew amplifier, a one-of-a-kind
Class A affair housed in a discarded Hewlett-Packard instrument
case. It had that unmistakable sheen of a fine industrial instrument,
with the square push-button switches and lit meters. Though it only
delivered 70 watts a side, it made a bigger impression than his
speakers. "It didn't matter what you hooked it up to-it was a
revelation," says Seifert, who met John in a stereo shop during one of
those sales visits.
That amp-a precursor to the groundbreaking Electro Research
A75-was too expensive to produce in quantity. Instead, Iverson
designed a large Class AB amp which he sold in small quantities as
the first product under the Electro Research name.
The A75, introduced around 1974, was indeed a revelation. It got
rave reviews for its highly detailed and coherent sound, and clearly
pushed the envelope of solid-state electronics with a then-
unmatched musicality (though this magazine ultimately found it dark
in character). It was only rated at 75 watts-per-channel at eight
ohms, but it could handily drive a one-ohm load, and Iverson
emphasized, fairly, that with any speaker these were "really big
watts."
At $2100, the A75 was incredibly expensive for the day and
quite limited in supply, thus making it all the more desirable.
Iverson liked to further amplify its High End mystique by suggesting
that it had been adapted from a circuit he'd built for turning gun
turrets on Navy ships. He was also fond of telling dealers that one
particular unit had survived a fall out of the cargo bay of an
airplane. In truth, the A75 had some widespread reliability
problems, notably in earlier units. Nonetheless, it became a sensation,
and left Iverson with a band of loyal admirers and customers who
stayed with him throughout the years.
His legendary status was only enhanced during this time by his
development of what he called the Force Field loudspeaker. Never
sold commercially, it was a prototype for a dipolar, massless speaker
said to be based loosely on the Corona Wind speakers of the 1950s,
which worked by ionizing air molecules in an electric field and
exciting them with the audio signal. But the Corona Wind concept had
never been successfully applied to a wide-range speaker capable of
significant volume.
Twenty years after the Corona Wind, Iverson designed huge
amplifiers using mercury vapor tube rectifiers to generate the
tremendous power required to make such a speaker listenable. The
speaker itself consisted of a series of vertical rods mounted in a
stainless steel frame. From 1973 through '77 or '78, he pushed the
Force Field through three successively larger iterations. The last was
about as big as a Quad electrostatic and put out levels of 70 to 80 dB.
Because of the high voltages involved, it was prone to corona
discharge, and flooded a room with ozone. "You could see the blue
spots forming near the rods and you'd have to go over and blow
them out," says Hefley, one of the many friends who watched and
heard the speaker evolve in Iverson's workshop. "If you got too close
it would jump to your nose and shock the hell out of you."
Seifert also spent long hours with Iverson listening to the Force
Field, usually in a dark, closed, hot room. "Later on, when I got into
the physics of how it worked, I realized why we liked it so much," he
says. "The primary by-product of that speaker was nitrous oxide. I
think as the evening progressed we just got mellower and mellower."
Of course, like any speaker, the Force field had its sonic faults. It had
no bass and had to be augmented with a subwoofer below 200 Hz. It
also beamed like a laser. "It was so directional you could bounce it
off the wall and listen to the reflection," says John Curl-and
consequently, it tended to favor soloists over orchestral recordings.
But if you were in the sweet spot, Seifert says, "you could hear all
kinds of detail and depth of imaging you couldn't hear from any
other speaker, and I had heard just about everything at that point.
To this day, I still consider it the most accurate loudspeaker I've ever
heard."
As for what happened to the Force Field, well-no one knows
for sure. Iverson's most entertaining explanation was that the
government found out about his invention when he applied for a
patent, and the FBI, once again, visited his workshop, this time
collecting the inventor and spiriting him off to a debriefing room. He
was shown some strikingly similar and highly sensitive particle
beam technology being worked on by "the Gov," and was warned not
to market his new device, lest it fall into the hands of foreign
countries, and Iverson himself take a much longer trip.
As preposterous as all this sounds, Martin DeWulf, an attorney
who publishes the High End newsletter Bound For Sound, avows that
Iverson once sent him a copy of a patent application clearly showing
the device "denied by U.S. government intervention." Stan Rosick,
meanwhile, recalls seeing parts of the Force Field lying around
Electro Research's Chatsworth facility, where he believes it was
disassembled in preparation for another upgrade and just never put
back together.
In any event, Iverson's business dealings proved to be equally
high-voltage. He was a talented salesman, but a poor entrepreneur
who preferred the laboratory to the front office. In 1977, at the
height of demand for the A75, he formed a partnership with Mel
Schilling, then one of his dealers, in a new marketing company called
Electro Research Audioptics. The idea, says Schilling, was that
Iverson would design while Schilling sold product and helped run the
Chatsworth plant. "The basic fact was that John was brilliant in the
field, a great designer," says Schilling. "Whether or not we had
difficulties, our discussion was always about whether a concept was
marketable, not about whether it was good."
Difficulties they had. Iverson could be intractable when it came
to his ideas, insisting, for example, that his new EK-1 preamp be built
in a solid casting instead of a sheet metal case. Schilling warned it
would take too long to develop the casting. "But John thought it
would be so unique, that no one had done it, and he was adamant,"
says Schilling. "That killed it in terms of getting it on the market,
because the casting was never right."
Iverson was typically a dedicated, indeed, driven worker. Says
Seifert, "he would obsess on a project and that's all that mattered-he
wouldn't eat or sleep until it got done." But he could also be
unpredictable in an enterprise where many activities focused around
him. He was known, for example, to update circuits without properly
documenting the changes for the production line. Or, "we could be in
the middle of designing an amplifier, and he would decide right there
that he needed a motorcycle trip, a little R&R," says Schilling. "And
off he would go, disappearing for a week, and the plant would just
stop."
The relationship with Schilling didn't last long, but not because
of Iverson's work habits. Shortly into the partnership, Iverson met
David and Phillip Tan, two successful High End importers in
Singapore with an interest in manufacturing and substantial capital
to back it up. They agreed to fund development of the EK-1, and
Iverson made arrangements-without consulting Schilling-to sell
them the Electro Research name and transfer production to
Singapore, where tax incentives and cheap labor would allow him to
build the product the way he wanted it. The plan was for Schilling to
stay in Chatsworth and continue to do the marketing. But A75
production was phased out, and the EK-1 continued to be plagued by
delay. With no product to market, Electro Research Audioptics was
shut down, leaving Schilling out in the cold. Yet, he harbors no
animosity. "The closest people John had to him were me and my
family," Schilling says. "He probably ate at my house more than he
ate at his own."
...continued...
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(C) 1994 THE ABSOLUTE SOUND. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Not one word of this article may be reprinted without the written
permission of the publisher.