The name pre-dates the company by many years. It was originally a joke from my dial-up days on Prodigy. My friend Ed was teasing me about wanting to learn more about tube electronics, and I made up the name of the company I'd run; and it stuck after that. Ed responded, "Love it! The obsolescence goes in before the name goes on!" after a national ad of the time.
As I got more into things, I started doing repairs. A great way to learn, and a great thought exercise. One of my first customers was my friend Greg who was a terrific luthier & had studied with Barry Lipman. I kept his amps running, and he tweaked my guitars. It was a great match. I was cutting my teeth in the bars of the Bronx and he was full of great guitar tips and lore. I was also getting better at maintaining my own gear, and eventually started getting jobs restoring other people's stuff. I formed an actual company with OEI to be able to purchase parts at jobber costs, depreciate my test gear and pay taxes. I even had a PO box for privacy. I had also helped with launching WeberVST by this point so I had a good network and a growing appreciation for the importance of specific components in the overall picture of how amps sound.
A few years in I was repairing a 50W Marshall head. The owner had used Yellowjackets (which are generally fine) to cut the amp's power, but there had been a catastrophic tube failure that had taken out the power supply. He wanted it put right, so I pulled out a poorly implemented master volume, re-built the high voltage supply, put in new tubes and everything seemed great until I play tested it. With no signal, it idled perfectly, no hum, no fuss. But as soon as an AC signal was run into it, the amp exploded into uncontrollable oscillations. I could not ID the source of the issue. I thought I had lost my mind, or at least my groove. Then my friend Simcha theorized that the output transformer may have developed a pinhole through its insulation during the power failure incident and what I had now in fact, was a relaxation oscillator. Under signal it was arcing internally. To test this, I should swap in a new OT and see. I ordered the closest thing I could find from the OEM and waited for it to arrive. I installed and it and while it resolved the issue, the amp sounded very different. It was colder sounding, with mushier lows and a strident high end. It took a lot of tweaking to get a good sound from it, which was strange because previously there wasn't a bad sound to be had. Simcha designed and hand wound her own transformers and studied with an old timer named Morry in New Zealand. She had some theories about what was amiss. I shipped her the old OT to tear down and blueprint. I think shipping alone was close to $100. We discussed publishing the winding plans so that people could wind their own. She sent me the plans and with help from friends in the industry here I contacted a winder who had done work for some very successful boutique amp mfrs. They had some experience around what worked in guitar amps and they agreed to make some prototypes for me. Once we really looked over how hard it was to make a good one, we decided to manufacture them rather than publish plans. Plus they can be dangerous if your insulation isn't done well. Safety and convenience won the day, and I was going to become a manufacturer of sorts.
Meanwhile lots of folks told me that the transformer doesn't make a difference. 'a fender will still be a fender if you put a Marshall output transformer in it'. "you're wasting your time". "you're wasting your money". So much support! I knew they did make a difference, and these comments were missing the point. The circuit will always be the biggest contributor to sound and feel - it's the design, after all. After that, the speaker is critical. You can make or break an amp with your speaker choice. You don't need golden ears to hear it either, it's almost impossible to miss. That was the heart of the WeberVST value prop - an inexpensive component swap anyone could do and immediately hear their results. But transformers were somewhere in the murky & poorly understood world of "all those other parts". And they really need to be installed by someone with experience; the highest voltages in an amp flow through the primary winding. This can be over 500V sometimes; not the place to start learning. Also, if the lead dress (where the wires physically run in the chassis) isn't correct you can make the amp unstable. Joe Barden once told me the secret to this work is that, "they're all unstable; and that once you understand that, everything makes sense". Words to live by!
I spent months doing R&D, trying out different cores, slightly different primary impedances and so on. Trying to educate myself about what affects the sound. In each case I would live with the test unit for weeks, seeing if I got tired of how it sounded, if it was too hard to find a good sound on the amp, or if I looked forward to cranking it up - did it put a smile on my face every time, with every guitar. Human hearing is notoriously inaccurate and our memory of sound is as well. I was trying to find a good workaround for that, to get a reliable outcome. I spent my spare time in the basement, listening and playing. My wife was a little frustrated, as was Max the dog who would sit at the top of the stairs and drop his tennis ball down to me. It was a lot of work.
Long story short, I finally found a combination of parts and primary winding I thought sounded as they should in the amp and I took what little money I had I had in the bank and had 50 pieces made (about where they become affordable due to machine setup costs). I sent 5 out to people I knew well, who knew guitar sound and tech to get some feedback, and if they really liked them, perhaps some clients or word of mouth. They could keep them if they popped them in an amp and listened. I think 4 of them actually installed them, and 3 of them really liked them. The fourth was a great amp maker but not a fan of Marshalls (so I learned!). I went ahead and set up a website and started advertising them for sale. I was either going to sell them or have a lot of paperweights. I had some confidence in the R&D time and effort I'd put in, and in my own hearing and playing. I had taken my time and sweated the details. I'd also lifted a technique from my work with Ted Weber; I replaced the paper insulation in the original with Nomex. I did not want to mess with the insulation's thickness or other paper-like properties, but I wanted these units to be nearly indestructible. Running a tube amp flat out is very tough on the output transformer in particular because as you put energy into the coil and then cut off one of the outputs (what happens when you clip), you collapse the field; and that energy has to go somewhere. This is the same theory as the spark coil in your car. You energize a coil, and then break the connection (when your points go open), and the resulting spark from the coil's field collapse ignites the gas. Some amps have 'flyback' diodes from their plate circuit to ground to provide a path. This is an old technique borrowed from industrial solenoids, which again, have the same issue. You see these themes again and again. Simcha told me of some Australian amps that had spark gaps built on to the output transformers (!). Generally though, the insulation is enough if it's done right. Thanks to the Nomex and my own testing, I offered a replacement warranty on our units, something I still haven't seen anyone else do, to this day. We've never had one come back either. During those months of testing I had ran them flat out into an old Sholtz power soak for hundreds of hours, trying to see if I could kill one. To this day I have not succeeded. <knock wood!>
I had recently gone back to school and was interning in 1997, working on Wall St up to 50 hours a week while carrying a full time course load. I still found time to launch OEI, and I got the post a couple times a week. By 2003 or so I was a few years into my first real job. We had two kids and a dog and I was working long hours on top of that. I was out the door by 6AM M-F and home some days after midnight. I could no longer get to the post office and after trying a couple of alternate options to get pieces shipped I shut the operation down. If I couldn't do it right, I didn't want to do it at all. And I'd made the point I wanted to make, namely that the output stage and transformer made a big impact in a guitar amp, and that we could build some of the best regarded units in the world. As Simcha put it, "How many times do you get to be best in the world at anything?" Today there are multiple vendors that are household names and which have a variety of good parts to choose from. I think they all existed back then, but I'd honestly never heard of many of them (or I wouldn't have tried!) and some were pretty expensive. When you're lucky to gross $80 a night playing guitar, a transformer that could cost $250 plus installation labor is a very tough expense. I sold our 50W for $107.50. I just wanted to earn enough to be able to make more models and keep some inventory. By the time we closed we made a 50W, 100W, RS Spares repro (with all the windings) and an AC30 output. Professionals from Sonny Landreth to Anders Osborne used OEI in their amps, and people still remember them fondly which makes me feel like it was all worthwhile.