Tube audio · Lučenec, Slovakia
Once heard, never forgotten.
Every unit is designed, laid out, populated and measured by one person, and built only after it has been ordered. Nothing here is made in batches.
Why
A resistor ladder converts a number into a voltage and nothing else. No oversampling, no digital filter, no correction of the signal after the fact.
The AD1865 is an eighteen-bit ladder from the last century, and by modern datasheet numbers a newer delta-sigma part beats it comfortably. That is not the argument. The argument is what happens to the music between the file and the loudspeaker, and how little is done to it on the way.
Everything after the converter is valve, balanced where you want it balanced, and fed from supplies that are deliberately oversized. Boards are 2 mm, two-ounce copper, ENIG gold plated, including the power supply boards.
Owners
Written by the people who bought one
Units are in listening rooms across Norway, Sweden and the rest of Europe. Their owners wrote at length about what changed when the unit arrived.