Recently I've shared a few stories with you of our history over the last 50 years—half a century of making audio equipment. There are a lot of stories, some I covered in my memoir 99% True, while others have gone untold. Still others lost in the mists of time.
One such story involves the creation of the Digital Lens.
A decade or so after the introduction of the CD player, we audio manufacturers were totally immersed in the challenge of extracting all we could from this new media. At that time, vinyl still trounced digital (and not by just a little). CD reproduction through an external DAC was a fledgling category just out of the nest and fending for itself. Even the finest of DACs in that day were hard, bright, and somewhat two-dimensional sounding.
There was a lot to learn back then.
At that particular junction in time—the mid 90s—I had sold PS Audio and had moved my family from California to Colorado to join Infinity founder, Arnie Nudell in designing and building loudspeakers and the electronics needed to make them sing. The name of our company was Genesis Technologies.
This deviation of mine, from a pure electronics company like PS Audio, to a loudspeaker/electronics company like Genesis, left me twiddling my proverbial thumbs (not something I can tolerate for long). I had already designed all our servo electronics and power amplifiers to go with them, was working on an entirely new idea in amplification that would one day become the Stealth Amplifier (user-adjustable class A bias from, 1% to 100% and a novel MOSFET pure current amplification output stage that has still not been duplicated to this day), and was itching to get back into the digital fray.
During that period, my fellow designers and manufacturers in the high-end were expending all their efforts at raising digital performance levels by focusing on the all important analog output stage. During that era we saw everything from big vacuum tube outputs to high speed ultra linear analog whiz bangs. A few companies were experimenting with different DAC architecture like the dCS Ring DAC (around 1989), the PS Audio Ultra Analog entry (around 1993), but for the most part, the bulk of companies were basing their designs on off-the-shelf DAC chips from TI and others. *All these DACs were still what we refer to today as R2R DACs that were limited to 20 bits or so-like the Ultra Analog version from PS—the exception being the 24 bit "sort of" performance dCS achieved".
I, on the other hand, was headed off in a very different direction. Tomorrow, we'll pick up the trail.
