With a room packed full of onlookers, I set up the microphones and was concerned about trying very hard NOT to set the gain too high so as to spare us all the horrible sound of low frequency feedback. So by that time I had music playing so I could blend in the broadcast speakers - and I remember thinking how odd it was that I was already hearing plenty of bass and hadn’t yet turned the broadcast on! Well no time to process that so I turned on the broadcast speakers with less gain than I recall from before putting me farther away from yellow zone of potential feedback or booming. That was a good thing, I could relax.

Read the entire article here: http://www.decware.com/paper95.htm

Read prior articles here: http://www.decware.com/newsite/articles.html

If you’ve purchased the new iTouch from Apple you’ll find tons of impressive features however, output level is not one of them! Perhaps the lowest output level of any MP3 player made?

You’ll be pleased to know that using it with a ZenHead portable headphone amplifier turns it’s very unimpressive sonics into a dynamic and textured performance that is of good enough quality to be enjoyed by any audiophile!

The iTouch has such a low max volume that even most headphone amps can’t get it loud enough to enjoy and if you find one that did, it would be too loud to use safely on everything else. The ZenHead has been evolving internally to now have adjustable gain, adjustable input impedance, and the cross-feed can be turned on or off via some high quality internal switches. This makes it easy to set up for the wide range of sources it can be used with!

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In part III of the Zen Open Baffle project we complete the original design concept with the broadcast system and I have a couple epiphanies as a result of raising my personal benchmark for best sound I’ve heard to date. I knew it would work, I hoped it would be good, and had no idea it would redefine what good is!

You can read the article here.

It’s almost ironic to consider using digital equipment to manufacture good old analog tube gear!  Nevertheless I’ve seen it happen in my own shop over the years for a variety of reasons.  The picture above is my test bench where everything we build is tested and or troubleshot during the Quality Control process.  This bench is in the QC room adjacent and open to our large reference room where everything is listened to in a real environment as it is being tested.

A guy came in my shop the other day, new to Decware, and after looking around made a comment that he expected to see (more…)

Above are the new Zen Open Baffle speakers.

As a continuation of (PART I )we have constructed a pair of these speakers based on the latest design that uses the more complex resonant cavity. The results greatly exceeded our expectations that were set by the first drywall prototype.

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The ZP3 phono stage has been in development for several years as a one-box alternative to our ZP1.0 phono stage that used a remote power supply.

The ZP1.0 was designed as a reference grade phono stage. To reach the performance level it did, it required it’s own dual mono remote power supply which priced it out of reach for many people. You can read about the work that went into it in the following two papers, Diary of a Phono Stage” and
Official White Paper for the ZP1.0

Since then the ZP3 has been one of those pet projects of mine that I would get out about every 6 months and try to make happen. I say try, because I had set the a fairly high benchmark with our ZP1.0 and didn’t want to settle for anything less, especially in the noise department. (That’s where it always got sticky). It’s hard to build a phono stage in a single chassis that is as quiet as one done with a remote power supply.

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The CSP2 is one of those things that comes from constant R&D. It started as a project one night to see if I could come up with a headphone amp that could replace the MLB. For a dedicated headphone amp, the MLB was at a price point that kept people who were not into headphones from trying it. I wanted to do some less expensive circuit designs and see what was possible. You see, I’ve heard magic in headphones - it requires a lot more than a cheep pair of headphones and a headphone jack. I know my customer base, and what they like. I know if they heard this magic I’m talking about they would embrace it. By doing so they would expand their audio experience in many wonderful ways. It’s a fact that it would improve the sound of their two speaker system because it’s such an excellent tool for hearing what the music is suppose to sound like.

I know why there are not more audiophiles into headphones. I was one of them - and being the type who is really taken by good sound stage depth I never particularly cared for that in your head imaging of headphones. Headphone enthusiasts will often remind you that “good” headphones are typically not like that and while partially correct, most fail to realize that it is in fact the headphone amplifier that makes the most difference.

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