A week ago, the focus here was on the professional career of the darTZeel founder and the circuitry features of his patented output stage. This week, we will discuss the company's employees, upcoming new devices, the special darTZeel 50-Ohm connection and Hervé Delétraz's musical preferences.
Dirk Sommer: Since when have you been able to make a living from your hi-fi company?
Hervé Delétraz: Only very recently! From about 2010, it took quite a long time before I was able to make a living from it. In 2010, I was able to give up my other job. But it's still difficult. You really have to be passionate about it. Otherwise, I would have given up many times because it wasn't that easy. But I love it, so I'm not going to stop. You know, it's getting easier to make a living out of it now.
DS: How many employees do you have today?
S2: Today we are nine in the area you visited, plus the guys from PRO, the reintegration company who do the pre assembly (“PRO: Entreprise Sociale Privée d'Intégration et de Réinsertion Professionnelle" is a foundation, that also owns the building where darTZeel is located. ds) They are between two and six. It depends on our needs. Not all the nine employees have a full time job, some work part-time. For example, the engineers in R&D department work 60 or 80 percent because I like to give the people some freedom. When they are more relaxed they simply work better. I don't want to stress them. The results are much better when they are not stressed. We now concentrate everything in the facility where you were today. Before we also did some R&D at a place further away. But it wasn't so easy to archieve good synergy when you couldn't talk to your engineer directly. Spontaneous solutions are not possible when you are 100 kilometers away. Because it's too complicated. When colleagues the in U.S. or in other countries are 1000 or 2000 kilometers apart, it's not easy to create a design that you can be sure is your baby. I want to have something that pleases me first and I hope that it will please the others too. So far it's beenokay. I hope that I will be able to continue this way.
S1: What are your next developments?
S2: In fact we have a lot of things in the pipeline. On our website you can see that we are currently launching the anniversary edition of the pre and power amp. We have made some changes to the electronics. We will only produce a limited series. 25 years ago, the 108 made its debut, and that's why we will produce 108 sets of the amplifier and preamplifier. With the 108, we made a slight change to the power supply to increase the output power. When we went from model 1 to model 2, we were able to increase the output power without changing the power supply because we made a slight change to the circuitry to make better use of the voltage swing and get closer to the maximum swing. With the first model, maybe 5 or 6 volts of the voltage swing went unused. That made a difference in the power output. But in the next step, we can't do that anymore because we're already very close to the maximum voltage swing. Now we're going to swap the transformer and the capacitors inside to increase the voltage. We'll increase the power output from 150 to 250 per channel at 8 ohms.
We now started the Anniversary Edition. But these are nice days in the summer and everybody is on holidays. Nevertheless we have already received some orders, but I think there will be many more next month and the months after that. The goal is to start production in October, Depending on how many orders we receive, we may be able to purchase all the parts sooner or later. So it depends. But the goal is to start on 20 October, because that date will also mark the 20th anniversary of darTZeel Audio, as we started as a registered company in October 2004. So all these numbers come together, but the Anniversary Edition is not really a completely new product because we will improve the existing power amplifier. We will also upgrade the preamplifier with an even quieter phono stage and we will improve the internal power supplies. In the old power supplies, we use high-efficiency voltage regulators. But all these regulators have their own negative feedback to compensate for voltage fluctuations. So my goal is to develop a new type of regulation without negative feedback and to implement this in the preamplifier. This alone will make a big difference in terms of sound quality. So much for the Anniversary Edition.
Then we have to two more entry level products that we launch soon: It's a small stand-alone phono stage and a small stand-alone streamer/DAC like the LHC 208 but without an amplifier inside. It will be smaller without screen but with some indication by LEDs for sampling rate and so on. This way we can maintain the high quality but archive a more affordable price. We expected to launche these two devices this summer – but as usual there have been some delay and maybe it will be more like the end of the year or early next year. I had planned to release the streamer/DAC first, but maybe we will launch the phono stage first, because this small phono stage is being developed together with a larger one that fits our high end cartridges.
DS: And what will the price of the new phono stage be?
HD: I hope that the price for the new two smaller devices will be around 12.000 to 15,000 SFR, The problem with the Swiss products is that many people complain: “Your products are getting more and more expensive.” Yes. But that's not up to us, but rather the Swiss franc. The exchange rate of the Swiss franc is bad for the euro currency. This June, prices in dollars and euros fell slightly for the first time because these currencies were slightly stronger against the Swiss franc. But that is very rare. Usually the opposite is the case. Prices keep going up and up and up. The price of the LHC 208 is now around 25,000 or 27,000 euros, I'm not sure exactly. The goal is to make entry-level products at almost half the price. For darTZeel, these are really entry-level products. And on the other hand, we also have a new flagship preamplifier in the drawer, which should go better with the big monoblocks.. We are on it for a long time But it's not easy to beat our existing pre-amplifier because it's so good. It's not easy to build a better one. So we think about it and will not release something which is not really better. If it's not, I'm not the guy that says: “This is new. So it's better.” No, I only want to release it if it's really better. That's not easy because the original pre-amplifier uses some optical and analogue devices to build the volume control, and it's very transparent and it's very difficult to improve on that. We are working on it. The plan is also to release a smaller mono blocks in between the 108 and the big mono blocks, both in terms of price and power. We have a lot of projects. The only thing we lack is the time and money to develop more and faster.
DS: Aren't your 50-ohm-inputs a problem because your customer don't have anyother components that match them?
HD: Yes. But in our devices we also have RCA, BNC and XLR connectors. So if you have a darTZeel preamp and a power amp from a different brand, our the other way around, you can always connect them together. But there is no question: If you have two darTZeel devices with our 50-ohm-connections and use the appropriate cables, you will immediately hear a difference. So if you connect two darTZeel devices, that we call instruments, with our cable, you have more than the as sum of the of the separate parts, you have something bigger because the cable helps them shine more.
DS: What's the technical advantage of this connection?
HD: I wrote a paper 20 years ago about the advantage of having a fully matched connection. I chose 50 ohms because it was the termination that was already there. So I didn't need to to develop a special cable because there were already some 75 and 50 ohms. 75 ohms were used for digital. I didn't want to cause confusion, so I chose 50 ohms for myself. 50 ohms cables were also used for telecommunication networks and the internet. If they were in coaxial they were also used in the measurement labs and for antennas for broadcast. Everything was 50 ohms then. I choose this because so I had a wider choice of cables in this industry. If you would choose 75Ω, you would not have the same choice. So I wrote my paper and I showed that with end-to-end impedance matching, you cancel all the echoes in the cable.
A lot of cable manufacturers say that their cables have a rise time. If you have a rise time in the cable, it is only because of the echoes, because the echoes go back and forth. If you enlarge the image on an oscilloscope, you can see that it is not a slope, but steps. I have shown this in my paper. But if you match the impedance, you don't have any echos and the square wave is a square, no matter how long the cable is. The signal has a rise time of of five nanoseconds at the other end. The signal is delayed in time because the propagation time in the cable is about five nanosecond per meter or so. That's it. When I published the article in Stereophile in 2001, it was funny: All the cable manufacturers told me that I was a crook and I was telling lies. But it was just physics. Then they said that the echoes only appeared at very high frequencies. It's okay. But, you know the human hearing system is quite complex and you can hear things you can't measure, for sure. If you listen to music with a matched or an unmatched impedance, you can hear the difference immediately. As soon as the impedance is matched, it sounds as if you lifted a veil: It's just clean, crystal clear. So I decided to make all my connections that way.
It's different with loudspeakers because unfortunately speakers don't have a constant impedance. So it's difficult to build a suitable cable or you have to do it with a network at the back of the speaker to control the impedance. But that's a bit complicated because you would have to make one for each speaker model individually. Anyway, I will introduce a speaker cable soon that's based on different physical approach. I don't like making things that I can't explain. Snake oil is not my cup of tea, you know? I'm not criticising people who make speaker cables: There are many very good speaker cables out there, but we don't have an explanation why one cable sounds different from another, because we can't measure it. That's the challange to find the explanation why. You know, I'm close to the answer.
DS: My last question: What is your taste in music?
HD: At the time when I was young I didn't listen to French music. Not at all. Because we were teenagers - and we were idiots. French music is nice when you are older because you can listen to the lyrics. Do you listen to German music now? Maybe when you were young, you might not have heard it.
DS: Not in my youth and not now either.
HD: I liked all the English and American groups and back then was pop/rock. We listened to Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Asia, Supertramp, Jethro Tull, Genesis and of course Pink Floyd, a lot of those pop/rock groups at that time. I only got into jazz later, in the late 90s. But I didn't start with jazz, I started with pop and rock. My parents didn't listen to music, you know, so I didn't have a guide to classical music. My mother liked it very much when I played pop music: I played it very loudly in my bedroom and she could hear what I was listening to in the kitchen. Then I made her some cassette tapes for her car. So she was listening to my music in her car.
We never had that classical music education. Now of course, I know quite a lot of people who like classical music. When they play classical music, I like it, yes, I even love it. But for me it's difficult to pick a record off the shelf and tell you, why I like listening to it. I have no clue about this music. Classical music in particular is very complicated for me because you can't simply choose Mozart or Beethoven: There are so many symphonies and each symphony has been conducted by so many conductors, there are so many versions from so many places. So for me it's a world of its own. But I appreciate it when a friend who is familiar with it, plays vinyl with classical music for me. Not only in classical music, but also in jazz, I have a slight problem: I don't like it very much if only one instrument plays, because I tend to fall asleep, you know. For example the very prestigious Köln Concert by Keith Jarrett: I can't listen to it because I fall asleep in the middle because only the piano is played. I like it, when there is more than one instrument. Even in classical music I sometimes miss the voices. That's why I prefert to listen to operas or operettas because for me they are something more alive than classical instrumental music. They are richer. With instrumental music I miss something.
DS: Thank you very much.
HD: It was a pleasure.
