Years of experience have shaped the founder's preferences towards one technique versus another, and along the way, some discoveries have been made too. One which is called Solid-Tube^tm and has a patent pending. Although this page does not contain any trade secrets, it does describe the principle of Solid-Tube^tm.

What is Solid-Tube^tm

Solid-Tube^tm is a technology we discovered in October of 1998 initialy designed for our next generation of amplifiers. It offers extremely open sound stages while keeping the neutral, accurate and natural sound of a live recoding. The Solid-Tube ^tm is a new and clever combination of jfet, mosfet and bipolar transistors where each technology works at hiding the shortcomings of the others while extracting only the most desirable linear characteristics of each.

This aproach is not totally new for some known designs do take this route. The Cascode assembly is a well known example of this - but never before did anybody try the combination we call Solid-Tube ^tm. Analog stages designed witch this are extremely linear and very imune to power supply noises, a heavenly characteristic seeked by every audio designer. Such an assembly provides extremely linear stages which exhibit outstanding characteristics yet slightly reminds of the sound of tube components. Solid-Tube is experienced as a very natural and extremely open sound stage where the system disappears to leave only the music. Yet this transparent sound comes with a touch of warmth otherwise found in tube electronics.

It was named Solid-Tube ^tm because it is mainly based on solid-state technology but it reminds of the Tube designs in that the result is extremely transparent and open.

Who uses it

Our Solid-Tube ^tm technology is a fairly recent discovery and the complete line of products to fully include it besides the Odéon-lite DAC is to be introduced at CES2000. It is fair to say that all our products from now on will always include the Solid-Tube ^tm analog stages and we are also considering licencing the technology to third party interested companies but haven't offered it yet.

Some companies have contacted us though. If you are a manufacturer and you are interested in using the Solid-Tube^tm technology in your designs, please contact-us.