Interviews

Nic Poulson is a telecommunications engineer who studied and worked at the BBC in the eighties as a sound engineer. After leaving the BBC in the early nineties and further developing his passion for audio equipment, Nic has become a well-known designer of electronic circuits with Trilogy Audio Systems company. He also designed and implemented runway lighting systems at various airports. For us the most important thing is that he was one of the first people to notice the problem of power supply systems. That's why he founded IsoTek - in order to deal with this in an appropriate manner.

Some audiophiles claim that one of the fundamental principles when selecting hi-fi equipment is simple - if you are going to buy a speaker, amplifiers or cable, check out how big is the factory where it's built - the bigger it is, the better the equipment. I honestly don't know where this comes from, because Bentley has a much smaller plant than Toyota or Nissan, but I would rather drive a Continental GT instead of an Auris or Juke. Smaller, highly specialized factories are able to chase or even outrun big corporations. Some say this may happen with speakers or tube amplifiers - stuff that doesn't need innovative thinking, but when it comes to streamers or digital amplifiers, large manufacturers will always be ahead. But is that necessarily the case?

Sonus Faber is one of the most recognizable brands in high-end speaker market. The company was founded by charismatic Franco Serblin and it has built its reputation mostly on audiophile monitors. Massive boxes finished in real wood and leather have earned favor with music lovers around the world in a relatively short period of time, turning a small factory into the rank of a place where real works of art are born. One doesn't even need to know about technical matters to see the artistry of Italian designers and craftsmen. A few years ago the catalog has been fairly stable and divided into three main lines. Top models rarely changed, while slightly larger movement prevailed in the lower series.

Geoff Merrigan is one of the founders of Tellurium Q, a company which manufactures cables and audio electronics. Why the company itself is relatively young, the approach to audiophile cables is rather unusual, prioritizing research on the nature of electric signals, physical phenomena and measurements. All this, of course, is to achieve the best sound quality, but you can tell that people behind Tellurium Q think that the whole fun should be the end of the process, not the thing you start with. In other words, these cables are not formed on the basis of trial and error during listening tests. Instead, the whole design process begins with exploring the phenomena occurring during the transmission of electrical signals, and the final product has to be like printing the conclusions of these studies into the real world.

Distributors and retailers of audio equipment are usually interested in devices from England, Germany, France, Italy, USA, Scandinavia and so on. We have western, northern and south Europe all covered, plus there are some companies from China, Japan or even New Zealand. Countries like Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Russia practically don't exist in the consciousness of a typical audiophile. It's a shame, especially when you see such products as these made by a small Lithuanian company named AudioSolutions. I had an opportunity to listen to the Euphony 50 speakers and I have to say I liked them very much. During the Audio Show 2013 exhibition in Warsaw I also met their creator - Gediminas Gaidelis.