SWR Sound Corporation

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

SWR Sound Corporation is a specialist manufacturer of bass guitar amplifiers, preamps, speaker cabinets, and acoustic guitar amplifiers.

[edit] History

The company was founded as SWR Engineering, Inc. by its namesake, Steve W. Rabe. Rabe was well-known for his engineering work at Acoustic Control Corporation. After extensive research with top Los Angeles studio bassists, SWR found immediate success upon the release of its first commercial product in 1984, the PB-200 hybrid tube/solid-state bass guitar amplifier. The first 5 units were manufactured by hand in a garage in the San Fernando Valley. This model soon became the SM-400, one of SWR's most revered early products. It wasn't long before SWR felt it needed a speaker cabinet as good as its amps. In 1986, SWR released the Goliath, a 4 x 10" full-range speaker cabinet with a built-in horn tweeter, a first for bass cabinets.

The company's name was changed to SWR Sound Corporation on 1 December 1997 as part of a restructuring plan. Rabe sold the company to accountant Daryl P. Jamison and soon created a new company, Raven Labs. SWR was based in Sylmar, California until January 1999, when it moved to the former Cetec Gauss speaker factory in nearby Sun Valley, California. On 2 June 2003, Jamison sold SWR to Fender Musical Instruments Corporation for a rumored $8 million, after a previous year of lagging SWR sales and dwindling market share. Jamison reportedly tried to sell to Fender earlier for a larger sum, but this failed to materialize.^{[citation needed]}

SWR is now a brand in Fender's portfolio rather than an independent company, and its products are now manufactured at Fender's facilities in Corona, California and Ensenada, Baja California. Fender is headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Currently (Q4 2006), it is rumored that Fender's brand management strategy is in the process of restructuring. SWR ads have not appeared in Bass Player magazine for quite some time.

This article or section is written like an advertisement.
Please help rewrite this article from a neutral point of view per Wikipedia policy.
Mark blatant advertising for speedy deletion with {{db-spam}}. (help, talk)

(Q1 2007)

FMIC was very careful with its "absorption" of SWR, as some of the manufacturing methods are quite different from the traditional Fender way of doing things. Although the Workingman's Series of mid-priced amplifiers was upgraded (heads & cabs in 2004, combos in 2005) and renamed WorkingPro, most of the R&D and manufacturing resources allocated to SWR (which includes several employees remaining from the "old SWR") spent the first two-plus years learning how to build distinctly "SWR sound" amps and ensuring they would pass the more stringent safety standards of FMIC.

At the 2007 Winter NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) Show, SWR launched the ambitious SM-1500 head, which combined the hybrid tube/solid-state platform with some FMIC-era innovations, including a tube-driven compressor. At 1500 watts (in bridged mode at 4 ohms), this head is presumably the most powerful toroidal based amplifier on the market today.