Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity Video Interview, Vladimir Lamm, 2003

we have uh Vladimir lamb from Lamb Industries uh is it Dr Lamb or just V okay Vlad man Vlad uh would you tell us a little bit about your company and when it was formed and where it was formed and what were your first products um my company was formed in September of 1993 the first product that we introduced was is uh now it's relatively F famous model M of hybrid amplifier M 1.1 mhm and in a year we introduced our first preamp L1 and this is how we started are you originally from uh Russia yeah originally I from Russia I came to the United States in February of 1988 mhm did you have a a Hi-Fi company in Russia at that time everything belonged to the government it was I left Russia before the end of communist era uh I was many years I worked for Russian military industry and then uh I became I started working for another company it's also government company uh as a chief designer of uh it was big company chief designer and we designed audio equipment for Consumer and professional use what range of products do you manufacture now uh mean a range of amplifiers or we now we manufactur seven models of power ramps uh two models of preamps and one final stage oh sorry not seven uh four four models of power ramps to totally seven models four four models of power ramps two PRS and uh one one phal stage do all of the Power amplifiers use your design of having a tube input stage and solid state output stage they have uh actually two lines of of the equipment one it's hybrid line that utilizes uh solid state output stages and hybrid uh front end transistors and cubes and uh the second line it's uh pure tube Electronics you find it there's a big difference in the sound of the uh of the tubes that use for input stages I know there's a lot of uh discussion of this on the Internet is that the 12 ax7 this one sounds different from that one and do you find that's the case no usually what I do I create certain topologies that uh from my point of view uh using this topology I can optimize the sound uh to make it as neutral as I can do and uh without adding this type of the sound that we call analytical sterile sound I mean to save the soul of the sound you know uh therefore for me it's relatively useless to discuss all these nuances this of course in any each topology I mean if you use the particular 12 ax7 for example in that or this amplifier of course it will sound differently everything should be optimized it's not you cannot take it uh from the content you have to do things it's like the design it's this is the complex process you know you cannot uh extract something from from this and to start start analyzing you have to do things everything should be done properly uh when you lived in in uh Russia was was there a lot of feelings about uh high-end audio like we have over here okay let me tell you at that time Russia was you know it was big concentration camp with closed borders you know uh only domestic equipment was available you know and there were no access I mean no possibility to buy the real stuff you know from the equipment that was produced in civilized countries but uh there were a lot of methods how to get this equipment you know it's uh through diplomats Black Market whatever you imagine uh now you see because of the TV after that war in Iraq what's going on it's the same garbage in each communist country in each dictatorship you know MH and it was possible of course to get anything and uh when I became the chief designer of that company Audio company I got the access to anything that I wanted I could order anything to analyze they wanted me to copy all these things but I had my own ideas every I designed a lot of stuff from that company all these designs were original designs done by me and uh at the same time I started thinking about audio the audio and all these things it's more serious and I develops my methods that I'm using uh how to design the audio equipment what I say properly this is my definition you know uh and this is what I'm doing and the rest it's you can see you can hear my equipment and you know the Russian tubes are very very popular over here do you do you use them at all actually I was a inventor using that large 6 c3c in audio equipment originally this tube was developed to be used at a regulator serious tube in in voltage Regulators but in somewhere in 1972 I tried in maybe in 1971 or 72 I don't remember I designed my first prototype using this tube was OTL amplifier and I got very serious results 72 it's it's a while ago it's 24 years ago but then I started I analyzed this prototype I did a lot of measurements uh listening and I switched back to more traditional soes it's like Push Pull mhm if we are talking about push P or singlehanded and I use these tubes quite successfully it's are very good tube tubes uh and the Russian industry still manufactures a lot of tubes lot of tubes well I I really appreciate having you come by today and thank you very much you're welcome