MHDT
The M is for Mouse, one of the, more vocal members of a group of 4 Taiwanese audiophiles that remembered that there was a brief period after the CD went mass market, where it just seemed from memory that digital audio really did hold promise for the Audiophile. That time came and went. Frustrated with trying to hear something *real* from some of the best modern DACs, they got together and tried to decide the most minimal approach, something that could get closer to the music instead of closer to this obsession for detail, because if the goal is to enjoy recorded music at it's finest, then attention should not be focused on the things that add length between you and the music in any way, including the way the digital signal is decoded. These Philips TDA chips create HF well beyond human perception, however, there is no need for a complicated filter circuit either, since simple things like ferrite beads easily filter this out, leaving behind a very organic, natural digital conversion, buffered by a tube, partly to have a proper output power, and because a very little bit of harmonic distortion from the tube sounds good to the ear, thus a very simple organic output.
This is a myth but it does represent the issue. "The US spent well over a million dollars to develop a pen that would write in zero gravity... the Russians just used a pensil.".
Back to MHDT: These 4 guys went from selling their home-made units to friends, to getting some in the hands of some respected reviewers, but the entire operation was out of an e-bay store, and they only carry whatever units they decide to build at whatever time. They change units at a whim, so there are several different versions of the same model, iterations over the years, improvements, but still sticking to their ethos that less is more with the release of the Havana, which has even less on the output side, no op-amp at all... These guys came out of nowhere, but never reached a true critical mass, as in, it would have been the Woz making many many home-buiilt apple][s, and never really having the the improved devices catching on, and Apple would have gone down as a blip like many of the other could-have-beens of the time.
With MHDT, they do not want a Steve Jobs, they like what they do and the niche they fill. Mouse has stated that he, and his friends, will continue the persuit of designs based on the idea that less is more, regardless of how technology moves forward, there is always a way to do the new thing better with less, though for some reason we out-pace ourselves and design for every engineering hurdle, creating solutions to problems that don't need them as a simple creative circuit layout can fix the thing that could have caused the design to move to a 1bit sigma delta oversampling setup, creating complication to fix problems in the things designed to fix the problems of the original thing that didn't need fixing under the right care.
Audez'e could be very much like this... you are benefitting from the work of hobbyests that found a way to make enough money to support their hobby. MHDT, they did not design any DAC chip, they use NOS Philips and Burr Brown, so it makes perfect sense to me when I imagine these guys using readily available parts to design around, especially ones that have such documentation. I doubt there is not a single register or transister on the DAC chips that MHDT uses that isn't down in a spec sheet, and I am sure the driver used in the LCD-2s have been tested, plotted, and published very accurately... if it was ever yo be meant to be used in a studio... I mean, most of the tubes we love for audio were designed for a specific device, not the other way around. We just happened to note that if we wire it this way, we get a good amp circuit. WE is the source for many of the great tubes and they were generally designed to be within spec for devices very specific that are no longer used, but the tube designs aren't automagically bad because of this, it just means that is the spec on the design and we build something around it today. Back when these tubes were being rolled off the line for the first time, I am sure laughter would have been heard if someone said "this tube will end up later in it's life having a million amps deisgned around IT.!
I commend Audez'e as I do MHDT, SET amp designers, and many of the other groups of people just said enough with the BS we can take this and do something with it... It all brings us closer to the music.
