From the Founder & Builder
I'm Bodie Dennis, and as much as I love building amplifiers, I never really expected to be doing this for any other reason than that. The explanation for how I ended up doing this lies at the confluence of many factors, but I'll do my best to put it all in a nutshell for you.
So naturally I'm a guitar player (of over 35 years, thank you very much), and of course I grew up tinkering and soldering together curious experiments. To me, such things seemed perfectly consistent with one another. Growing up in the 1980s, my heroes all seemed to be daring artists and mad scientists alike. They were all one part Niccolò Paganini and one part Nikola Tesla, and I wanted more than anything to be like that.
I studied music back in college, and my first real jobs were helping with repairs in music stores, and then later, engineering at recording studios. During those tenures, and throughout my recording life since, I've had loads of firsthand experience with legendary old guitar amps and unreachably coveted audio equipment, and I've made detailed mental notes of all the memorably great pieces that I, sadly, couldn't acquire along the way. Thus, bench-building recording gear that I couldn't otherwise find, let alone afford, became a standard practice for me.
Then in the troubling days of 2020, all of this background culminated in a natural but unexpected way. Fortuitously, I found myself with:
- loads of free time due to the pandemic;
- a brain that was already in the right mode from performing recent maintenance in my home studio;
- closets full of old parts from years of voracious hoarding;
- dissatisfaction with the guitar amps I already owned, and;
- a wallet that was too thin for the soaring vintage market.
As it turns out, if you throw this whole situation into a jar and shake it for several months, you might get something resembling my original 6V6 amplifier which became the basis of the GSE-5 'Rapscallion'. That homely little amp and my continuing astonishment with it is what drove me to take my wife's advice and build more. So after many additional months attempting to clone my original creation using parts I could reliably source new, I finally succeeded, and Foundling Audio Labs was born in 2021.
Since then, I am simply astounded by everything that that inauspicious project turned into. I've become very thankful for my ability to replicate the results so well for others, and I derive incredible satisfaction from the positive feedback I continue to receive.
So why the name Foundling?
No doubt you know the adage, one man's trash is another's treasure. Well the overwhelming majority of what I've learned about audio over the years has come from old items that someone else was getting rid of. I however saw the value in them, and often it only took a touch of understanding to turn an abandoned piece into something remarkable. I merely wish to share that understanding so that music lovers like me can see what's great about technologies that were once considered totally outmoded.