Boston Audio - Boston Audio Design develops audio products that set new standards for performance and value. The flagship product is the Mat 1, a pure carbon record mat praised by audiophiles worldwide. Computer machined and finished by hand, the Mat 1 is one of the most cost-effective upgrades you can make to your turntable. New this year is Tune Blocks. Isolation devices that bring many of the benefits of the Mat 1 to a wide variety of applications - including CD and DVD players, preamps, power supplies and amplifiers. This illustrates, once again, the importance of using some kind of vibration dampening device under everything in the system to achieve a synergistic solution to resonance control.

First Watt - First Watt builds very simple high quality / low power audio amplifiers intended for use with sensitive high quality loudspeaker drivers. The first watt from an audio amplifier is the most important watt, and amplifiers whose distortion declines with lower power tend to sound better. All other things being equal, a simpler circuit sounds better. So does an amplifier with little or no feedback. Class A operation results in higher quality than the other classes, and is well suited to simple low power amplifiers, partly because it has lower overall distortion and partly because the distortion is “monotonic” where the distortion decreases with level. It's easier to build high quality into a small amplifier than a big one, and people with sensitive speakers do not require or even want high power.
”I would never in a million years be able to tell if the F1 used tubes or transistors if I didn't know already. I heard neither the slow bloat of one nor the icy crunch of the other, at their respective worsts: Just music, played well, in a framework of good sound.” Art Dudley

Intermezzoelectric - Cables that economically maximise the performance of conductors used in audio applications. Previous efforts have included air dielectric and tubular conductors widely spaced for lowest capacitance, inductance and skin effect. The abandoning of any contact between components required the flaring of one of the signal-carrying tubes and by molding it into a DelrinTM RCA-plug. Voila! No soldering, no bad dielectric and superior sound. Any downsides? Yes, with continuous connecting and disconnecting its stiffness gave rise to fragility and finger and metal fatigue. Wonderful reproduction, yet inconvenient to use. Many customers enthused over the old design but we wanted to go many steps further, thus, in early 2005, we wrestled an unlikely solution that is sonically and practically superior. The success of this new design relied on the complete elimination of plastics. Even Teflon had to be ruled out. The only place where a fraction of plastic is now unavoidably present is in the insulator in the connecting plug itself. Dynamics, purity and lifelike sound of a previous unheard recorded reality.

"I haven't heard anything better... It's a lot of money, but if you havea system of good enough quality to reveal the finest details of the recordings, Intermezzoelectric is worth every cent" Lars Fredell, Fi Magazine and Stereophile.

Murata - Warning: The muRata super tweeter effect is addictive and can positively become habit forming. It helps bridge the gap between live and reproduced music. Disconnect the super tweeters, and it feels like someone turned off the lights: the presentation becomes darker and less present; to put it bluntly - boring. Once experienced, it's definitely hard to live without them. Their auditory system impact goes well beyond refining the upper octaves. If your high-end system is ready for a dose of Viagra, be sure to check out the muRata ES103 or its slightly less expensive brother, the ES105. In either case, your listening enjoyment is likely to catapult considerably closer to the live experience. Adding the MURATA to your audio system allows you to experience the advantage of the extended frequency response delivered by the new digital audio formats (DVD-A, DVD-V containing 96/24 stereo PCM audio, and SACD) and to fully utilise the 30kHz plus frequency response previously only available from high-quality vinyl reproduction. Another bonus is that CD and Nicam stereo, together with Dolby Digital and DTS compressed digital audio formats, are also greatly enhanced. Just as the subwoofer fills in the bottom end, the MURATA fills in the top end. It makes the music much more real! All Instruments - even double basses - take on an extra clarity that is neither bright nor brash. In fact the sound is both clearer and smoother. The really surprising thing is that when the tweeters are played alone, one can barely, if at all, hear a thing. Remarkably, however, all listeners - even, for example, those having no sine wave sensitivity above 10kHz - experience the same enhancement when the Super Tweeters are engaged, describing the sound of their hi-fi systems as 'more natural' and comfortable to listen to.

MURATA is the only company worldwide that are able to construct and develope membranes made of ceramics of this extreme quality. It is a sensation that they have made it work. The audio comunity is totally unaware of the cost involved in this venture. It is a vastly superior technical solution unattainable for any US or european company.

What are you waiting for? The MURATA is also totally filterless and that alone is creating something really spectacular in high frequency reproduction. The product quality is also in a legue of its own. Lexus springs to ones mind and maybe the analogy is excused. What can I say more. YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW GOOD YOUR SYSTEM IS WITHOUT MURATA. PERIOD. IT DOES NOT TAKE A DEGREE IN NANOPHYSICS TO UNDERSTAND IT. EVERYONE CAN AND SHOULD HAVE A PAIR CONNECTED BEFORE THEY DO ANYTHING ELSE.