It's pretty obvious to anyone that knows us to know what we do. We make high end audio equipment. But why? What's at our core? Why do we not make $30,000 DACs? Why do we not make $99 preamps? What drives us as a group of people?
I don't have any quick elevator speech to offer but I can sum up the motivations in not too many words.
At our core we give the middle finger to the impossible. When someone tells me it's impossible to make a $6K DAC sound better than a $30K DAC, or a $700 integrated as good as a multi-thousand dollar one, that's the reaction I get; although I refrain from that gesture. The impossible becomes possible when someone achieves it. Roger Bannister was the first person to break the 4 minute mile and he did that at a moment in history where it was thought to be humanely impossible to do so. Within a few months of his feat no less than 16 other people bettered his record. Once they knew it was possible, their bar was set higher and they too could do the "impossible".
We dislike magic, snake oil and BS. As an engineering centric group this offends us and makes our collective heads shake.
Our customers are the end game, not our dealers. We love our dealers and distributors but we don't make products they ask us to. If our customers tell us we need to change, that's when we kick it into gear.
We make products we want to own and align ourselves with customers who understand and appreciate our core values. If it isn't something we'd be happy to take home and use, get excited about, want to tell the world about, it never leaves the prototype stage. My son Scott's upcoming Sprout all-in-one music player is a great example. There isn't a person in our group who isn't salivating to own one, me included.
What interests us is making music and bringing products to market with high value that delight our end users and ourselves.
In the end it's a pretty simple formula.
