Name Origins
Copyright issues prevented Marshall from naming THD Electronics after himself, as Marshall Amplification had been established in the 1960s. Marshall also decided against naming the company after his first name because, in his words, “Who…is going to spend $2,500 on an ‘Andy Amp?’" Instead he chose THD, the acronym for “Total harmonic distortion”.
“‘(Total harmonic distortion) is one of the ways that amplifiers are rated,’ says Marshall. ‘And in the hi-fi world, where people are quite conscious of total harmonic distortion, everybody goes for the lowest possible amount of distortion. In the guitar amp world, people tend to go for the most. So it was slightly tongue-in-cheek, but more of an inside joke.’"
Marshall has said that THD alternatively means “Two Hairy Dogs”, referring to his bearded collies, Truffles and Tobler and with the addition of a third dog, Piper, “Three Hairy Dogs”.
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Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“Grown onto every inch of plate, except
Where the hinges let it move, were living things,
Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one
Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:
The origins of art.”
—Howard Moss (b. 1922)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)