My experience has been this: they are located in a redneck-ish suburb(once an outer burg that eventually got swallowed up by sprawl)of my hometown. They started as a neighborhood instrument store, long after I moved away, and this had closed before I had to go back to the area on a regular basis for family matters. They had a listing on Craig's for amps/cabs that were left over from the retail days. At that time, I was unaware of all these allegations of swiping designs, or even of their supposed religious bent. I went out there to buy a speaker, and even though I had made an appointment, there was this vibe of uptightness of the "are you supposed to be here?" variety. The assembly room, while not exactly Waco compound weird, still had an aura of humorlessness, surprising for a bunch of 20-something workers. Now, it IS a very small operation, so I would imagine that economy of scale dictates the relatively high price tags, but they do seem to move a lot of units. On a second sale, which was thru Ebay, I went out to pick up a fairly esoteric EHX pedal, killer deal on a barely used item. As I was there, just to break the ice a bit, I was joking around, and made a crack about why Josh had a competitor's pedal and was selling it so quickly, and was he reverse engineering it. I might as well had been Jeff Foxworthy making an appearance at Harlem's Apollo Theater. Before you could say "lighten up, Francis", things got a bit terse. Whatever. Did the deal, and I was outta there. My question is this: has any other pedal building entity raised a stink about JHS cloning THEIR stuff, or is the Devi situation isolated? If there have been others calling out JHS, and JHS did not retaliate, was JHS singling out Devi not only for saying "hey, wait just a minute here", but also for her sexual orientation and lifestyle choices, which usually gets under the skin of fundamentalists. I know that's a big assumption on my part, but it's anyone's guess. Religion makes people weird, in my book.
