I never did follow all the drama and have no idea what you guys are referring to. What's the abbreviated version of the story? Or is it even worth getting into? If not, forget I asked.
Michael the most recent drama surrounds two primary things, criminal charges of charity fraud against MLS (the owner?) and increasing QC problems culminating with the MFW-15 subwoofer. More generally from the way it looks to me the history of MLS problems date way back even prior to AV123 with his bad habits finally catching up with him in the aforementioned issues.
Essentially MLS has always been known for operating beyond his means. Relying on investors, prepays, and promises to meet operating/lifestyle costs. The result has been a string of business one of which was sold off going under shortly after. Most recently AV123 as far as I can tell never really was anything much more than a glorified “buyers clubs” which kept some inventory on hand but usually took orders until enough volume was created to fill a shipping container. So there was never a high capital investment in either production or research like Axiom.
AV123 seemed to operate primarily on hype dished out by MLS and spread by his fan base. When issues arose and they have for some years, like substandard crossovers, the fan base quickly stamped out any dissent. The occasional problem they could not quell was turned into a positive by the personal intervention of MLS who would take extraordinary measures to “take care of the person” usually creating a new fan and invigorating the existing fans with his awesomeness. So essentially AV123 existed primarily on the “good will” (in an accounting sense) of it’s rather rabid fan base and their spreading of the “word.” Any time someone really got tenacious about taking MLS to task in a forum he would play a sympathy card, he’s sick, family member sick, dog sick, and his fans would take the dissenter to task for being so mean to pick on someone when he’s down.
The first big hole in the armour was the MFW-15 amp problems which seem to be driven by AV123’s need to find ever cheaper suppliers, possibly cause by the economic downturn, resulting in even more QC problems than usual. They probably would have survived this if not for MLS and his fans pissing off one particular person who took it upon himself to shine a light on the workings of MLS and AV123.
The primary angle he(?), the vigilante, used was various charity raffles which word from some recipients (forum members) was that they never got all the money. This vigilantly seems to have collected enough information that when presented to the office of the Colorado State Attorney General they found sufficient grounds to start an investigation which finally lead to multiple charges of charity fraud against MLS.
The alleged fraud against various charities was enough to silence most of the AV123 fan base (a few diehards held out for a while) which allowed all the other problems AV123 was having to get the full air time that they deserved. With the “good will” evaporated there was really nothing left to keep AV123 afloat except for the greed of those willing to buy steeply discounted products. Real discounts this time and not the over inflated MSRP discounts they were always having.
AFAIK that’s it in a nutshell.
