I just now thought I’d look up dear Victor Campos, a.k.a. Veek (as Misha Scheider called him, a.k.a. Vitta Cramps (as he was once called by a telephone operator). What sad delayed news. In the 60s and 70s, Victor donated a lot of his weekend time at the Marlboro Music Festival and occasionally donated some equipment, including a pair of KLH33’s. I met him when I was lucky to be the recording engineer there in cough 72. Victor was so fun and so knowledgeable and generous. He made me feel good by saying he liked the way I “control the machines” (a Swiss way of saying calibrating). Out of the blue he also gave /me/ a pair of KLH33's. What a sweetheart. They are my main speakers to this day, and they sound better than ever, thanks to Audyssey calibration. In my second summer, I spent several days in a glorious lab on the 3rd floor of the Necco building, with windows open to the beautiful Cambridge days that week (KLH, right?). My task was to solder some honking shielded-pair connectors while watching John Dean testify on TV. I bet many, maybe all of you, must know the story of the secret project for a new large speaker, which was to be called the BMF, until for some reason it was changed to something else at the last minute. And, if you never heard his rendition of a short excerpt from a song by Alban Berg, you missed out. The melody was of course completely atonal, and the lyrics were, "She stepped on my _______. I let out a scream, Ahhhhh!" I think Victor must have been the translator. The word he chose was exquisitely at home in the context. We worked and chatted many a late night in the cool silence of Vermont summer. It was so quiet we could hear the faint transformer hum of the AKG C12A mic preamp, listening on our KOSS ESP-9s.
