well he said:
When folks opened the RA-1 up and cloned it for their personal use, John was not thrilled but he was not angry. When folks started selling the RA-1 clones and CALLING them RA-1 Clones, well it was too much for him.
again, its a simple dual opamp headphone amplifier, every cmoy is basically exactly the same idea... i dont think the RA-1 was in ANY way an original design... the only issue i could see is people selling "RA-1 Clones" using the name RA-1...
also i do not think that the RA-1 is a bad design, all the simple opamp amplifiers (CMOY, RA-1 etc) are great in their simplicity even if they are not 'ideal' but they are very effective in what they do, especially since grado's are so easy to drive...