A nice follow up to my SW1X Audio Design DAC III Balanced review: “Is not it all about pleasure enjoying music? In order to maximise that pleasure we went great lengths with our ongoing Research & Development.”
“We made a choice to go the long and hard way i.e. not for the cost saving, quick money by following current fashion & trends in the mainstream industry. What seems simple, it is not- we can assure anyone with that. If only complexity in the circuit design gave us the best results we would certainly have opted for it.
However it is all about elegance in the simplicity and not simplicity for the sake of simplicity- that elegance in itself is very hard to achieve because every detail matters more than in a complex design. If simplicity was the objective, would otherwise have ended up with just a bare board, wires and a couple of passive/active components. Contrary to simplicity, we could have chosen any modern DAC design, the low cost & widely available, noise-shaping & digital filtering Delta Sigma type + DSD – only if they offered the desired results in terms of musical performance. If we ever go into noise shaping technology, then it would only our very bottom of entry level product. We deliberately chosen not to follow that trend of chasing the numbers game as numbers are totally meaningless in the end if the music does not move you emotionally.
All our design is what I would call functional designs. All it means is that form (circuit & material design) follows function (musical performance) and not other way around. That implies that one will not find any fashionable gimmicks, unnecessary “bells and whistles” such as displays, lights and switches just for the sake of having them, which help to sell a product because they make the product more appealing to the customer. We have taken the purist approach with some Eastern influence to amplifier design. It is all about performance- therefore some lack of convenience features is a bargain price to pay for some extra performance. The results speak for themselves. The music sounds more articulate and alive than most people are expecting it to be… musicality, natural timbre, dynamic articulation and spatial separation are all present in abundance even in our entry level products. So, the most serious audiophiles and music lovers are bound for a pleasant shocking experience.
Furthermore, we went beyond any traditional approach in a circuit design as we realized that like with the Stradivari cellos, the devil is in the details. Nothing, absolutely nothing is randomly chosen or ended up by chance inside our products, not even a direction of a fuse inside. Everything has been carefully voiced, specially selected and harmonically matched to produce an overall musically pleasing sound. Even if one tried to copy our designs because of their performance or because they look so simple, one will eventually fail to producing anything sounding close to the assembled products we offer. Even we get sometimes reminded of this, trying to replicate our recipe every time, we sometimes get different results. So, voicing is an integral part of a production process because the series production is still relatively small.
Thank you Matej for the great review, which turned out pretty spot on accurate. Most of the qualities that our products display in reproducing music cannot be put into words. As the saying goes, the proof is the pudding. And every accomplishment starts with a decision to try.”