Standel (a portmanteau of standard and electronics) was the name of Crooks' side-business of radio and hi-fi repair, located in his garage at 10661 Freer Street, Temple City, California.
Once satisfied with his design, Crooks started attending local concerts to spread the word about his amplifiers and get musicians to test them.
Crooks asked West, a steel guitarist to try out his amplifier at Cliffie Stone's "Hometown Jamboree" show.
Crooks then took his amp to the Town Hall Party dance in Compton, California, where Merle Travis and Joe Maphis were playing.
Due to the high cost of building these amplifiers, (the JBL alone was $90, about 2–3 months rent in those days) they were used mostly by session musicians.
Their high prices (about double a standard production amplifier) put them out of reach for most amateur musicians.
In 1970, Standel unknowingly received a batch of defective output transistors that, over time, failed with a burst of direct current that also destroyed the speakers.
Eventually, in 1971, the cost to cover warranty repairs became too high for Standel to endure and the company found itself in severe financial trouble.
Following briefly in same year, CMI (distributor of the Standel and Gibson brands), acquired controlling interest in the company.
The amplifiers were most likely developed using Standel resources in coalition with Randall's head design engineer Gary Sunda.
For the next 25 years, Crooks continued design work for various amplifier companies, such as Barcus-Berry (which later bankrupted and re-emerged as BBE Sound under new ownership).
Crooks, for instance, developed early prototypes of company's "Sonic Maximizer" (although it wasn't originally titled "Sonic Maximizer" at the time) and holds a handful of patents of related techniques to "correct" phase response of speaker systems with alleged lead and lag characteristics (in phase) at inductive and capacitive regions of the reactive load.
In 1997, after 25 years of abandonment, the Standel Trademark became public domain, and Bob Crooks quickly secured it.
Crooks lived to see his original design reintroduced at the 1998 NAMM Show in Anaheim, California, 45 years after its introduction in 1953.
Each speaker receives a specially developed surround edge treatment and full re-magnetization before being put into another 50 years of service, in a Standel amplifier.
In 2023, Standel was purchased by Owen Duffy, a renowned vintage pickup winder living in Vermont.
Owen Duffy confessed his fascinated with Standel amps since he first heard Chet Atkins as a teenager, and music of the "Nashville Sound" era.