After all my head banging and work to finally figure out the simplest of solutions to building a low noise, high speed moving coil amplifier, I finally had a circuit that not only sounded terrific—better than anything else I had heard at the time—it was also extremely low noise.
Now, it was time to turn all that hard work into a product people could enjoy. As with all PS Audio products over the past 50 years, we wanted to offer a high-value device that wouldn't bankrupt our family members.
Perhaps the single most expensive part of a high-end audio product turns out to be the chassis. Metalwork is expensive. Resistors, capacitors, and transistors are cheap.
At the time, I was responsible for the looks of our products, though I didn't work in a vacuum. Our production managers, Rick Cullen and Bill Abplanalp were always ready to help me shape what we built into pieces of audio art. To this day I don't remember whether it was Bill or Rick that took my simple rectangular box idea and added a snazzy looking hood to it, but one of them did. That simple change added a sleek and modern look to the box.
The thumb screw you can see in the picture made it easy to open the "hood" of the MCA so that users could access the cartridge load resistors.
It was a simple, cool, high-value product that at the time lacked something. In its original incarnation, the snazzy hooded top was black anodized and the bottom was painted black.
To keep hum out of the MCA that would often sit atop a preamplifier, we had made the bottom out of steel. Any steel chassis must be painted (but cannot be anodized like aluminum). The contrast between a painted black bottom and anodized black for the top looked crude. Ugly.
What to do?
Our metal vendor at the time was located south of where we were in San Luis Obispo. They were in a small industrial area off of highway 101 in a tiny town called Buellton (home of Anderson's pea soup). Next door to the paint shop was an auto repair facility that just happened to be able to do their own chrome plating and polishing (Lord knows why, but there it was).
Standing outside the paint facility I would see these rows of auto bumbers after their bath of chrome plating and the gleam they displayed after polishing. They were made from steel.
Sometimes, lady luck just comes your way. For not much more than it cost us to paint, I had them chrome plate and hand polish the steel bottoms of the MCA and that is how, today, 40 years later, those lucky enough to still have these little gems can enjoy their exquisite looks and sound.
Thanks for hanging in there with me for this little slice of history.
