No matter how a company is regarded during it's trading life, everyone is always sorry when a company is forced to call in the receivers. It's especially sad when the company is John E. Dallas & Sons Ltd. and 1975 was to have been their 100th trading year.

Dallas are still trading, of course, but it's in an effort to realise as many assets as possible and to keep alive two highly successful lines that existed in the company, Hayman and Vox.

Paul Twist, Marketing Manager of Dallas, told I.M. "we're still trading as hard as we can. There's a lot of life left in our products and we're still selling as many as we can."

It's unfortunate that the corporation should find itself in trouble when certain sectors are very healthy. It's a parallel to the Rolls Royce situation, where the car section was booming but was dragged down by other sectors. In this case, the Hayman lines were looking very promising — especially in the States.

One of Dallas' proudest moments was the recent opening of the 57,000 sq.ft, factory and office complex at Shoeburyness. If not the largest musical instrument plant in Europe, it was certainly one of the biggest and undoubtedly the most modern.

"We've had to make 60 of the 200 workers redundant," said Twist, "And the others are on a three-day week. We're completing all the work now in hand and we're able to buy any stock we need to complete items that were in the pipeline."

The figures for the last ten years for John E. Dallas & Sons Ltd., speak for themselves. In 1968 the profit before taxation had sunk to £29 and over the period 1969 to 1973, pre-tax profits rose to £492,000. In 1974 the profits sunk to £50,312.

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Midas Amplification and Martin Audio combined to demonstrate their newest P.A. set-up at the I.C.A. in London last month.

Guests of honour were Argent and Pink Floyd and their respective road and sound crews. Midas and Martin have been combining regularly to produce high quality P.A. systems — Midas concentrating on the mixing console and ancillaries and Martin the speaker system and ancillaries.

The system on show had an output of up to 4Kw with a four-way electronic crossover system. Ten basic channels are incorporated in this system, although Midas mixers offer a wide variety of facilities.

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Pete Tulett has been appointed Sales Manager for Rosetti and Company Ltd. Tulett was a founder Director of Simms-Watts Ltd. and he became Director of UK Sales, Simms-Watts Division when EMI took over Simms-Watts in 1973.

He will now be responsible for marketing all Simms-Watts and Rosetti lines. His appointment follows the departure from Rosetti of Dave Simms who was the Sales Director after the take-over of Simms-Watts. Dave Simms intends to concentrate on expanding his own family retail interests but intends to continue his close personal relationship with Rosetti.

Mick Borer has become Production Manager of Simms-Watts Division and Alby Paynter takes over as Export Manager, in addition to his other duties of Shipping Manager and Purchasing Control.

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Amcron have announced a new Crown power amplifier intended for professional and industrial use but it will obviously find application where any very high but compact power output level is required. Called the M600 Power Amplifier, the unit is capable of producing a mono output of 600 watts into an 8ohm load, and 1,000 watts into a 4ohm load.

The amp includes built-in cooling allowing for continuous full-power operation and a plug-in input board which can be used as the basic elements for a pre-amp, band pass filter or for any other signal shaping circuit which become a built-in part of the amplifier.

The output stages of the M600 has an output bridge circuit which permits extremely high power levels to be safely maintained. The standard output of the M600 is 70 volts unbalanced.

Coupling two M600's together through a socket provided at the back of each amplifier produces a 140 volt balanced output. This configuration is called an M2000 and produces 2 kilowatts into an 8 ohm load. A peak-catching meter and threshold lights provide the panel output monitoring.

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Recording is an expensive business — usually you end up making mistakes and spending a lot of money for the privilege of doing so. Perhaps the perfect answer is the Lamb Mini Studio.

The Mini Studio is the first of its kind. It's a complete package of high-quality equipment which packs down in suitcase-size flight cases and can easily be adapted to almost any specification.

Lamb Laboratories are part of the C.E. Hammond Group. It therefore comes as no surprise to learn that the tape machine supplied in the Mini Studio is a Revox A77 (High Speed). The Revox is perhaps the best two track machine available and it guarantees technical perfection as far as an operator allows.

The basic components of the kit are: The Revox; a Lamb 4-channel mixer; four Beyer mikes; four stands (two with booms); and Beyer DT 100 headphones and all interconnecting leads.

The Lamb mixer is particularly interesting. It's basically a 4-channel unit which offers full EQ, mike attenuation, pan pots and echo send and it's fully equipped with output VU meters and a limiting system.

It's easy to add extra units to the basic mixer to provide any number of channels and the delight with this unit is that the user is assured of perfect compatibility between all components. In a later issue, we hope to be commenting upon the performance of the Mini Studio.

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Neil Sharpe, A C.A., has joined Farfisa UK Ltd. as Chief Accountant. He takes the place of Jim Clark who has now left the company to take up a new appointment.

After qualifying as a chartered accountant in 1973, Sharpe went to work for a firm of accountants in Lincoln before joining Farfisa.

He will be responsible for the complete accounting set-up within the company and he will have a chance of meeting many of the Farfisa Dealers personally at the Annual Farfisa Lunch on April 22.

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Rosetti & Co. have announced five new Epiphone guitars in addition to their existing range. The guitars incorporate a number of design changes including dovetail joints between neck and body instead of bolted joints.

Epiphone guitars are fitted with Gibson strings and undergo quality control checks by Gibson before shipping.

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Darryl Way, violinist with Curved Air, has managed to solve a problem caused by his perspex violin. Although the violin had good visual appearance, the dense body caused harshness of tone.

Now Darryl has taken delivery of a Yamaha RA 100 rotary tone cabinet which he uses for his violin. He has also added a Yamaha RA 100 to his Fender Piano and Yamaha Synthesiser set-up.

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DJ Electronics, the Southend-based disco manufacturer, have just announced their most ambitious DJ console to date. Called the DJ Stereo Disco Mixer, it incorporates almost every facility a DJ could ever need.

It's a large unit and it's not really intended for portable use. It's more for permanent operation in a disco, club or dance hall. The DJ who gets the residency and thus the chance of using this system will really enjoy his work.

A couple of I.M.'s staff had a chance to try the first production model of this console during a visit to the Southend factory. The control panel is the epitome of ergonomic design, offering even absolute beginners (like us) the chance of rapidly gaining confidence. The output is rated at 100 watts per channel and certainly sounds like it!

The cross fade between decks makes the whole operation ridiculously simple and the important feature of this system is the built-in stereo cassette recorder. This allows the DJ the facility of not only adding tape music to his programme, but also the delightful prospect of recording his show and then replaying while he takes a short break to answer the call of nature, have a pint or whatever.

As you might expect, the unit is rather expensive (around £1,000) but it's among the best units money can buy.

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Don't believe that the Stylophone 350S is any relation to the Stylophone that a well known Australian comedian endorsed a few years ago.

It's a new product from Dubreq, the makers of the Stylophone, but it is in fact a mini-synthesiser which sells for under £50. It's so good that many musicians have already added one to their list of keyboards. Rod Argent is among the players who have discovered sounds which are unique to the 350S.

The instrument has two electronic styluses and although the keyboard is not polyphonic, each stylus offers different sounds. Stylus two is a "reiteration stylus" which produces a pulsating beat. Like organ keyboards, the instrument offers a choice of woodwind, brass and string effects in 16, 8, 4 and 2 lengths. The whole keyboard is tunable within a tone. Vibrato and decay controls are also included.

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Kokomo, the band being heavily tipped for a U.K. or U.S. break through this spring, have taken delivery of a new giant R.S.E. mixing desk from C.E. Hammond. C.B.S. records are currently investing more money in Kokomo than anybody else and obviously a little of it goes towards equipment.

C.E. Hammond took over R.S.E. towards the end of last year and they have been concentrating on pursuing the U.S. market that has opened up so invitingly for the R.S.E. brand name. Now Hammond are ready to hit the U.K. and the full-range of equipment is being heavily marketed to the rock field.