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REMEMBERING RICHARD LARSON OF AUDIO RESEARCH
Julie Mullins
On November 9, Audio Research announced that retired chief engineer Richard Larson had passed away. Larson was born in Little Falls, Minnesota. He attended Bethel College and later took courses at the University of Minnesota. He worked as a recording engineer at Sound 80 Studios and was an electronics engineer at Telex for 25 years prior to his long tenure at Audio Research Corporation.1 According to an obituary on legacy.com, Larson’s passing occurred on November 4, just a day before his 86th birthday.
Larson was a longtime collaborator of ARC founder William Zane Johnson and played an essential role in bringing many amplification designs to fruition. “Rich’s engineering expertise helped flesh out Bill’s initial designs and, with his engineering assistant Ward Fiebiger, guided the designs through to production. Rich was pivotal in development of many classic ARC products such as the SP10, SP11, D250, Classic 60, and the first-and second-generation Reference Series amps and preamps,” the company’s statement said. Larson specialized in transformer design and fostered the creation of advanced, high-powered tube amplifiers.
“Rich was so perfect in his position,” Audio Research’s Dave Gordon wrote by email. “[Bill Johnson] was a strong-willed and demanding boss, and Rich was unperturbable, steady, and a great engineer who ran our engineering department so effectively.”
Larson worked for ARC from 1979 until he retired in 2004. “Over the years since Rich retired, he remained available when the current engineering team had questions or needed help with a new design.… Until his passing, he was consulting on the output transformer for the soon-to-be-released Reference 320M monoblock amplifier.”
Ken Kessler interviewed.
