Rudy Bozak - Final Years

Final Years

Saul Marantz joined Bozak as consultant in the mid 1970s. He helped with esthetic details of certain products. When both Bozak and Marantz teamed up to demonstrate loudspeakers at Hi-Fi events and audio engineering conventions, a sizable crowd would form. Bozak shifted from using McIntosh amplifiers for powering his loudspeakers to using Marantz amplifiers.

The B-401 Rhapsody speaker was reviewed in August, 1974, in High Fidelity, where it was said to have good power handling and a more constant impedance curve than most. Other auditors found a lack of bass response.

The last Bozak project that Rudy Bozak himself was an integral part of involved a thorough redesign of the B-200Y tweeter which had been a staple of Bozak loudspeakers since its introduction in 1962. The new design echoed earlier changes to the B-209 midrange: the standard tweeter cone shape was modified into a dished open horn shape that flattened out gradually from the center to the periphery. The new design became the B-200Z. Its basic curvilinear configuration was settled in 1974 but production didn't get underway until 1976 and early 1977. The new tweeter extended high frequency response to 16,000 Hz.

When Rudy Bozak turned 67 in 1977, he offered an opportunity for an employee buy-out headed by Bob Betts, his chief engineer. The arrangements required the personal loans of several key employees and would take a few months to transact. Bozak didn't wait for an employee buy-out; with a handshake promise to retain certain crucial employees, Rudy sold the rights to his corporation to an existing business headed by Joseph Schlig. Bozak stayed on in a minor consulting role. Quality was seen to go quickly downhill; the new owners appeared to longtime employees as being interested only in pulling money out of the operation. Betts and other company management officers left the company one by one.

Still, several good loudspeaker designs came out of a new engineering effort. In 1975, Bruce Zayde was hired by Bozak and Schlig as technical director; he began by implementing computer-aided design (CAD) as a tool, hosted on an HP 9800 running a COMTRAN program developed by Deane Jensen. Zayde introduced Thiele/Small design principles regarding system development so that loudspeakers could be optimized at the outset for any proposed configuration. The LS-300 became the first Bozak loudspeaker model to be produced wholly from a preconceived design goal. It was also the first Bozak loudspeaker with reflex ports. It was positively reviewed in April, 1979, in High Fidelity.

Rudy Bozak was not in favor of using ports or vents to tune loudspeaker enclosures for greater low-frequency output from a smaller box. He was a purist; he felt that the impulse and transient response of ported designs was inferior and that the augmented bass was too boomy. By the late 1970s, this stance was considered old fashioned; the greater majority of home and professional loudspeakers were using ported designs. As the first ported loudspeaker model was being prototyped at his former company, Rudy Bozak remained skeptical but was willing to stand back and observe the results achieved using the new scientific design methods.

In 1976, Peter Ledermann was hired as assistant to Bruce Zayde but on his second day was thrust into the role of Director of Engineering; Zayde was quitting. Ledermann spent the next two years re-engineering the complete electronic product line, including putting into production the 902, a bucket-brigade based rear channel delay unit. His efforts put Bozak once again into the position of being able to produce and service electronic products reliably and repeatedly. Later, working with Richard Majestic, for whom Ledermann worked previously at RAM Audio, the two men designed the new Listener series, the LS-200A, 220-A, 330-A and others, employing a soft dome tweeter for the first time, as the Bozak tweeter did not have the top end range extension needed to attract the changing marketplace.

Ledermann relates how Rudy Bozak himself was treated by Bozak's management: "...the new owners of the company relegated him to a dark, unlit corner of the upper floor of the production building near the bundles of stocked cotton wool acoustic stuffing. At the right time of afternoon, when the light streamed in from one of the few windows, you could see the air filled with particulate matter and through it, if you knew where to look, a small, round faced man with felt cap could be usually found sitting in the dark at his old desk with the one small lamp illuminating his face." In 1979, Ledermann designed the Bozak MB80 bookshelf speaker and brought it to the marketplace. This compact loudspeaker contained a soft dome tweeter, a 6" 209-W wide range aluminum driver designed by Ledermann, and a modified first order crossover. The MB-80 employed tweeter clipping protection and indication. Rudy Bozak took note of the project, but did not participate in the design.

In early 1982, Rudy Bozak died. His wife Lillian and their son-in-law Don Parks reorganized the company and quality of workmanship made a brief comeback from 1983 to 1985. The LS-200A loudspeaker, a ported model, was reviewed in May, 1984, in Stereo Review. The facility relocated several times: Newington, Bristol and New Britain but management was unable to sustain the effort. Finally, the company's assets were put into truck trailers to await final disposition. The company tooling was sold to Bill Kieltyka, president of New England Audio Resource (N.E.A.R.), an audiophile loudspeaker manufacturer based in Lewiston, Maine. N.E.A.R. redesigned the Bozak Bard outdoor speaker to have an epoxy-covered wooden enclosure rather than the original aluminum one. Much later, in 1997, Bogen bought N.E.A.R. to obtain the rights to Bozak's former outdoor speaker line. A civil court case was initiated by Seal Audio, Inc. (Joseph Schlig, CEO, President and Director) against Bozak, Inc. The Bozak name was sold to overseas interests who began to produce Bozak-branded equipment in China.