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Originally Posted by jpgr4blu
Good to hear. I always felt that ARC was, in many ways, the opposite of Mac---- less bling, more attention to the finer aspects of sound reproduction.
Based upon the sale, it would seem that ARC may be losing one important guy, however---Livio Cucuzza who designed the Galileo series which led to the Ref 160 amps. The new ARC look is, to me, an elegant update of the prior "science project" look. Of course, the Ref 160 monos sound spectacular.
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Cucuzza is an industrial design guy with an artistic bent, not an electronics design guy. I've never really heard him talk about any particular music or express a love of music. No doubt he is very talented. Coming out of Sonus Faber (who bought ARC from WZJ) Cucuzza was responsible more for the stylistic changes than anything to do with sound. He seems to specialize in carrying on the tradition of a brand while modernizing it, eg. Emme Speakers, Sonus Faber, ARC.
The Galileo/GS line was kinda one and done. Not really sure what ARC was trying to do with that ... a 'lifestyle' approach ? It always seemed an anomaly in their line-up, a swerve in branding that didn't pan out. The ARC sound is their real tradation.
The real loss for Audio Research was the 2017 untimely death of Ward Fieberger; I don't know if the company has yet moved on from that.