Thursday, March 29, 2007

Roger Sanders of InnerSound is Back

I found out through the web grapevine that Roger Sanders, founder of InnerSound is back, and has started a new company, focusing on electronics at Sanders Sound Systems.

For a short period of time I was the New England rep for InnerSound. In a way, I was the catalyst for good and bad things to happen to Roger. My girlfriend was producing ads for InnerSound, which ran in Stereophile and The Absolute Sound. When he ran full page ads in TAS, they often complemented Sara by copying the color schemes on the cover.

Anyway, around 2002 I was also the rep for a company I used to do some industrial and PCB design for, Smart Theater Systems (now Smart Devices). Norm from SMART called me up and said he wanted to go to the NY Home Theater Expo held in NY every year, but wanted to share a room with some one. SMART was producing a very nice performing (if industrial looking) line of power conditioners, as well as licensing the Hafler amplifier designs to produce a hybrid tube/solid-state amplifier which was well received. As it turned out, at the time InnerSound and SMART were both located in Georgia, so getting them together was pretty easy.

Anyway, Roger had the speakers, and SMART had the amplifiers, and together we had a budget for a complete room display. At this convention, John Marks from Stereophile spent a long enough time auditioning the InnerSound speakers to agree to finally commit to giving them a real review. You'd think Roger would have been really happy with me. Nope, he ignored me completely, and chose to have dinner with designers of a new tube amp that as far as I know was never sold.

Anyway, Stereophile gave them a great review, which is when Roger's fortune's changed for the worse. At some point Roger met a man with money to invest, who convinced him to move the factory from Georgia to Colorado. After this, as is well known, there was a falling out, and Roger left InnerSound. So, I was good for Roger, and I was bad for Roger.

My point to all of this, however, is that Roger is back in business, and seems to be quickly rebuilding products based on the original philosophy which he built his company on. Now if he can make electrostatics with the same smooth responses at the Eros and Isis with wider dispersion, he'll soon be the talk of the audio world.

Good luck to you Roger!

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