I am looking forward to the meet up and will be bringing the newest versions of my Black Swan phone preamp and the recent generation of the Black Amp. Possibly will have a version of the BlackDAC to show too.
Let me introduce my self, as time permits I am an old designer of Hi-Fi products whose business commitments have eaten up most of my time but am now getting back to Audio. A couple of years ago a friend (the designer of the Iconoclast Cables) encouraged me to build him a phono preamp that outperformed his Pass X25 ($13,000) at a lower cost, I accepted the challenge and created a unit that did exactly that. I sent him the unit in a black die cast box for noise elimination and it knocked him over but it was the ugliest thing he had ever see so he called it the Black Swan. I liked the name, cleaned up the package, and built a few for listener evaluation. You can see it at my web site www.austinaudioworks.com and I would like you to listen to it at the meet-up.
Another friend who I worked with years ago is now in the Audeze management and asked me to look into a better sounding headphone amplifier. I wrestled with the is sure for a couple of years and came up with the Black Amp, also in a black die cast box. Several friends here in Austin loosened to it, commented, and pressed me to sell them the prototypes because it is so good, tube sonics with transistor speed, quite unique. They will use it for demos.
The circuits I developed are no-feedback current-mode Class-A gain cells, so I applied them to the current-to-voltage converters for DACs and Bingo, another hit.
I will post pictures as I get new chassis in for them.
I would like you guys to listen and comment, this is how I learn to improve. I have a saying that goes:
"Every mother's child it beautiful' which means that anything you design or build is good to you because of emotional attachment so I trust you evaluation more than my own.
More later with pictures but for now I look forward to meeting you all in Houston and hearing our thoughts, will bring direct to disc records and turntable. Please write me with questions, am preparing YouTube explanations, you can see my answers to record questions on Youtube under my name
Thanks, Barry Thornton