If you look deep into the internet archives and newsgroups, you will see the Tom V. interacted and asked a lot of questions with Dr. Hsu. In fact, the first SVS subwoofer was built in a garage with Hsu parts. Dr. Hsu helped them a lot...then they decided to be a competitor.

Competition is good.

That said, being the son of an engineer, and having a technical background, I like it when the people behind the companies are actual engineers, such as Dr. Hsu, Brian Ding(Rythmik), and Dave F.

The amount of engineering (and knowledge)these guys put into their products is more than any other ID company gets from their founder that I know of.