At the last High End Show in Munich, Italy showed its best with some well known and highly regarded brands and also with new companies that are approaching the Domestic and International Market as seen at the newcomers booth.
A few names come to mind: Spirit Torino with their hi-end headphones, the modular open baffles by Roberto Verdi and his VREL Elctroacoustic and the cultural project by Hemiolia Records developed in association with Fondazione Luciano Pavarotti that brought open reel master tapes.
Among all these famous names we found AudioDinamica, an other newborn company from Torino: is this just by chance or there is a new wave in audio happening in Torino? I met the founders of AudioDinamica, busy in taking care of every single details to run the company as seen in all the start-up, and had a friendly chat to understand who they are and what are they bringing.
Question: Team, one old and abused question in our audiophile world is ‘there are more manufacturers than customers: what is driving you and your brand?
AudioDinamica: a very abused and old answer to this question is something that sounds like ‘there was nothing sounding exactly as we wanted so we decided to build ourselves pieces of equipment with outstanding performances’. Well, that is not the ground we started from. We want to approach the market differently. We are from Italy, the land of beauty and fine artists, our history is full of icons in every area. We dream to find, in the future, our products and our idea of product among those icons. That is a tough task but we want to try. Our approach to the development of product starts from two points: technology and design. We do invest not only on the technical features of every single product but also on the design in terms of form and function.
We have in mind a specific goal: we want to offer products
Q: Something more about you? Please introduce yourselves
AD: Founders are Francesco Matera, Gianluca Sperti and Angelo Zilio. We came from very different professional experiences but share the same goals and passion. On our web site, About Us section, you can find more bio info so we can spare the tedious details of our lives – they smile.
Other people are working and are determining so substantially the development of our products: Pierfrancesco Vallosio is our software expert, Sivio Tidu and Marco Ruffino, from lamatilde, are our product designers. Finally we have several suppliers from around Turin, all of them are at a few minutes driving distance from us. We like this, we like to be local.
Q: From 2012 to 2014 I have been marketing and adverting director at Gold Note. In those years I suggested to develop new products, or even the brand, in hi end through crowdfunding. Now a number of companies are leveraging on this opportunity to fund their growth. What about your life as a start up?
AD: We incorporated Innovation In Audio srls (I.I.A. srls) in may 2017 and during the last year we qualified and could be registered as Innovative Start Up at the Chamber of Commerce in Torino. We also created our brand AudioDinamicaTM and developed a technology we call Multi-tube balanced gain stage. We focused deeply on the best path to develop our company, on how to grow the company and present it as an example of excellence.
We are aiming at launching a crowdfunding campaign as instrumental to the production: we are not looking for financial partners or investors but we want to offer our design at a very competitive price. Crowdfunding can be a very effective tool to accelerate the development of products and to access funds differently from the past and at the same time allows to feel how the market is liking the idea or the product. The crowdfunding, today, is a measure of the potentialities of a company in a market based on a direct relationship between the company itself and the customer.
We would like to offer on a funding platform our modular amplifier, theSMA, based on the Multi-tube balanced gain stage. What is theSMA? It is a piece of equipment that can serve several functions as needed by the customer and can be upgraded in future.
It is a balanced tube/jFET hybrid preamplifier with remarkable performances, it can be equipped with a DAC, a MM hybrid preamplifier (balanced as well), and it can be a balanced class A headphone amplifier capable of driving any dynamic headphone and even high sensitivity speakers with authority.
Ok, this doesn’t sound really like a new idea. Let us add a detail: the multi-tube technology can work with a number of noval tubes in its gain stage (no feedback employed) and so it allows the listeners to appreciate the subtle differences and nuances of tubes. Performances stay basically the same, gain will clearly change a bit from tube to tube, but each tube will return its own character to the listener. A few examples: e88cc, e188cc, e288cc, ecc88, 8416, ecc82, 12au7, e80cc, e182cc, 5687, 7044, 7119, 6900, 6H6, 6H30, 12bh7, 6cg7 etc.
This is the heaven for tube rollers. Do you classify this feature as innovative enough for such a product?
Our prototype is running since last year and fellow audiophiles in Piedmont gave us so many insights to fine tune the idea and the technical details. The crowdfunding will allow us to fund the development of the chassis that demands availability of large financial resources. It is not the classical looking cabinet for electronics but a real piece of furniture with different finishing touches and customizations. It can be placed horizontally in a rack, or vertically or even on a specific stand we are designing. It is based on a rigid metal chassis and removable panels: we can use precious wood, metals with numerous finishes or colors, stone, carbon fiber etc.
We are aiming to the fully personalization of theSMA so that the customer can have its very own relationship with a unique product.
Q: Since 1936 up to today, when Hi-Fi was first used by RCA, we have seen so many approaches on the theme. Discrete components, minimum signal path, tubes vs solid state … just to name a few. What is your philosophy?
AD: We love tubes, we love transformers but we understand that certain performances can be guaranteed also with solid state. Well, performances can be obtained with any technology actually; our BeCube line sports low now jFETs and when possibile dual monolithic jFETs that are perfectly matched but clearly carry an higher price. Our approach to the design doesn’t start from a specific device but from the goals we have for the product: we prefer simpler/low components schematics as the best way to preserve an optimal music reproduction. We are firmly convinced on differential circuits, ie balanced, and we prefer them as they can offer higher accuracy on both the test bench and listening test.
Finally we put great care in parts selection and component quality.
Q: Your first product is a step-up: we see a surge in the vinyl market, but why did you started from such a small niche? Why this product that will fight against giants?
AD: As anticipated, we love transformers and we love the analog sound. During the past years we collected so many step-ups. We tested, listened to, measured and understood all of them and made up our idea on this mysterious object. Some of our considerations are here, in a note available also from our web site
Hence we designed our long sought after transformer, our toy. It is a very high quality step up with permalloy laminations and with balanced and unbalanced inputs/outputs and so flexible it can interface with multiple cartridges available on the market. It comes with high quality switches to set the transformer gain and load. A great toy. This is our goal: we want to create products that can be flexible and satisfy the most demanding audiophile.
Q: What is the current offering from AudioDinamica and what are you developing for the future?
AD: Our short term goal is to finalize the BeCube line and theSMA within this year. Specifically, the BeCube line will have a pre-phono, a line preamplifier, a DAC, a Streamer and mono amplifiers. We will work with Marco and Silvio to design also a rack for the BeCubes.
In 2019, after the successful Munich Hi End show, we want to develop a very exclusive pre-phono with LCR based equalization for both MM and MC cartridges. This pre phono will have two MC head amplifiers (one based on transformers the other on a current amplifier) and will have different equalization curves for pre-RIAA records. We would like to offer the final weapon for the analog gurus. We don’t see many of them offered on the market. A line level preamplifier and power amplifiers will follow to complete an exclusive line of electronics. On our web site we issue periodically on our blog news and information on the projects and share technical details of the products.
As a matter of facts, during the Hi End we chatted with many professionals from press and other companies and our technical notes gain so much interest. We started chatting on vinyl and ended up talking about wine! What a perfect matching!
Q: The look of AudioDinamica products is different from the classical Hi-End: what is your message?
AD: We started from an idea of simple and functional design but capable to capture the glances and interest with the numerous customizations. Both the BeCube and theSMA will follow the idea of tailoring the product on the specific needs of the customer in terms of function and form.
We’d love if our products were bought to keep them for a long period as the customer can upgrade its cube or SMA with more modules or just switching the aesthetic panels. We believe this is a path to attract new customers, probably younger and that pay attention to the look and technique.
Q: So … clear ideas and precise targets: best of luck!
AD: we thank you for the interview, it was really nice chatting with you. Your wishes are very welcome! Finally, let us dare the hardcore vinyl listeners: who wants to give our step up SUT n° 3 a try? Just contact us.
For further info: to the AudioDinamica website
