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NwAvGuy: The Audio Genius Who Vanished

posted by mrcoolbp on Wednesday March 26 2014, @01:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the or-so-I've-heard dept.

Angry Jesus writes:

There is a lot of snake oil in the audiophile world. A few years ago the pseudonymous NwAvGuy decided to do something about it. Not content to just criticize the hucksters, he designed a $130 headphone amp that competes with $1000 models. NwAvGuy released the design under the Creative Commons CC BY-ND license (attribution, no derivatives) and freely collaborated on revising it with multiple manufacturers looking to build and sell the amp. All he wanted was credit and to see that no one would take his design and degrade it with inferior modifications.

Then he disappeared. "In July 2012, NwAvGuy went silent. E-mails weren't returned, and blog posting ceased. 'He had gone quiet before -- for a month or so,' says Boudreau. But no one has heard a peep from NwAvGuy in more than a year and a half."

Since then some of the parts used in the last revision have been discontinued and one of the best values in high fidelity audio can't be manufactured anymore because NwAvGuy is no longer around to approve any changes.

 
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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by zocalo on Wednesday March 26 2014, @09:38AM

    by zocalo (302) on Wednesday March 26 2014, @09:38AM (#21486)
    Assuming he is actually dead (or incapacitated, he could have had a stroke/serious accident too) and not just lost interest in the project, then I can think of three possible reasons; whoever is managing his estate did it for some reason, it's on auto-renew and the paperwork hasn't caught up enough yet to bounce the transaction, or just a simple clerical error.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 26 2014, @01:17PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 26 2014, @01:17PM (#21605)

    Sure, there are probably an infinite # of possibilities, but occam's razor and all.