Cello preamp pictures

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Cello

Hi all.

Nice looking preamp. Looks beautifully made.

Lots of controls. I must admit that I am a bit of a knob bloke.
Personally, I would like to see within the specifications "knobs per square foot!! - just joking.

On a serious note, was / is Cello somehow tied in with Mark Levinson systems?

I remember reading somewhere a long time ago that this was a company spinoff . However I may be wrong.

Regards,
George.
 
Mark Levinson started Cello in the early 80s after flunking the final exam at the ML corporation.
Tom Colangelo left with him to set up Cello, Mr Colangelo was the Cello design guy.
Rumor has it that MarkyMark had his girlfriend do the endless labor of semi matching for the first Cello products, i have a picture of one of his female love laborers.

Mark's girly girly tap still remained too high, and Cello was also left over to people with a true business appeal.
Mark flunks overpriced China gear nowadays, sometimes writes books together with hardcore porn actrices.
Mr Colangelo has his own Viola company where he designs and builds beautifull flower amps.
 
Mark Levinson

Hi Jacco

Thanks for the reply.

I definately did not know that. I always thought that Mark was the brains / chief engineer, because the equipment was named after him.

The only thing that I remember from Cello, was a ridiculously overpriced passive preamp.

It was nothing more than a selector switch and an attenuator.

I remember reading an article on this preamp many years ago.

This is what made me think that it was perhaps a subsidary of ML.

Regards,
George.
 
Bit confusing, i agree.

The current Cello owner Mr McCullough has worked both for Madrigal (= Mark Levinson) and for the early Cello ltd company untill it went bankrupt 5/6 years ago.
Safe to say that everyone who has met Mr Levinson finds him an entertaining fellow.

Very pricy, but the Cello products from the second half of the '80s i've heard do ring your bell.
The modular Audio Suite pre-amp and the Audio Palette tone controll unit still are gems.
Here's one of the blue cap things you see in the last posted picture of the Palette Pre, a Roederstein KP1830 high freq. polypropylene and aluminium foil capacitor, even pretty neat stuff nowadays.
(should be, a 10nF/1% costs a buck fifty currently, better not leave words to diyA sharks how many i have)
 

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Audio History

Very funny Jacko but not very correct.
Jim McCullough bought the remains of Cello after Mark Levinson left and is still in business...
http://matthew-james.net/

Mark Levinson was married to an actress everyone was drooling about and together they wrote a book about the Art of Love-Making. She was not a porn actress AFAIK. Eventually they split up, divorced, so the book did not help for their own marriage hahaha.
After Mark was kicked out of Cello he founded Red Rose audio:
http://www.redrosemusic.com/
There was indeed a Chinese Amp that he sold overpriced and a bit modded with OPA627 ICs. Confronted with that he simply withdraw the model. Now he also makes tube equipment as he bought some tube amp company.
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Levinson

Tom Colangelo, Mark's pet engeneer become jobless after Cello closed temporarely and founded Viola Audio Laboratories with partners:
http://www.violalabs.com/
 
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This Cello stuff is a far cry from the original stuff when ML was still heading the company. Seems Mr McCullough or what his name is, bought the name but not the concept.

BTW, AFAIK Cello equipment was designed by Richard Burwen.

I have met ML once but he came across more as a marketing guy than an engineer.

Jan Didden
 
janneman said:
This Cello stuff is a far cry from the original stuff when ML was still heading the company. Seems Mr McCullough or what his name is, bought the name but not the concept.

BTW, AFAIK Cello equipment was designed by Richard Burwen.

I have met ML once but he came across more as a marketing guy than an engineer.

Jan Didden
No all early Cello equipment was designed by Tom Colangelo!
Mark is not an engineer but musician and ...............marketeer.
 
janneman said:

I have met ML once but he came across more as a marketing guy than an engineer.

He isn't an engineer. He was trained as and worked as a jazz musician. There seems to be slightly different storys about his own involvement in technical alspects. There was, and probably still is, a video somewhere on the internet where he talks about all this, and there he gave the impression of having the vision of the perfect sound reproduction, rather than having any idea himself how to achieve it. On the other hand, this biography
http://www.redrosemusic.com/mark.shtml
seems to suggest that started quite early to work also as a recording engineer and seems to suggest he was an electronics DIYer.

Maybe somebody who knows/knew him could fill in with more reliable info? John Curl must have worked at ML when its founder was still in charge I think.
 
AX tech editor
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From Dick Burwen's bio:

"As a consultant Dick helped Mark Levinson with the first products of Mark Levinson Audio Systems and Cello LTD’s Audio Palette. "

The typical construction of the Palette with 10's of small pcb's sitting on top of each other, with power and signal distributed through the chrome plated stand-off was Dicks hallmark.

Jan Didden
 
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