designed and built in Houston, TX
as discrete as possible
who, what, where and why
engineers
in the great state of Texas
fans of good design
passionate about music
that enjoy making things
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Matt Walton, P.E.
Chief Designer /
Managing Partner
Matt is a licensed professional engineer and a lifelong active musician who sings and plays bass guitar as his primary instrument.
He may not admit this, but those who know him well will say he can remember every single engineering formula that has ever hit his visual cortex, that he is a great amalgamist of theories and concepts and is well-versed in topics ranging from Greek, Philosophy, Science, any Wikipedia article he's ever read, Music and Sci-Fi Literature.
His design approach is the same whether he is designing furniture, electronics, or turbomachinery: Make it work wonderfully, make it robust, and make it beautiful.
Audio equipment has only one additional requirement: Make it sound really, really good.
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On design:
We are passionate about design on two levels - practical and personal.
On a practical level, designs should simply work, with a minimum of fuss and effort by the user and an efficiency of resources and materials.
On a personal level, I believe that good design must also be also elegant and beautiful. When you use our equipment you’re interacting with us through something we made, and that is extremely meaningful for us. We want that experience to be a good one.
Fernando Romero, P.E.
Master Builder /
Managing Partner
The son of an electrical engineer and woodworker, Fernando grew up around plenty of solder wire and nails.
From an early age he sought diversion from taking apart anything held together by screws, and scavenging components from consumer electronics.
A more sophisticated game became navigating and testing continuity in circuits with a Simpson Electric Analog Multimeter and building LED lighting circuits for the family's LEGO cities.
Musical instruments were discovered in the home during his teenage years, igniting a desire to play and record music.
Once computers became available, lawn mowing savings went into purchasing what today is a vast catalog of obsolete audio interfaces and cheap consumer-grade audio gear.
His artistic influences and design inspirations include Bauhaus design, sans serif fonts, folk music, biographies of accomplished engineers and astronomers, Civil War bearded Generals (both north and south), and mystical Japanese manufacturing philosophies and methods.
Now a refined man, a learned man, a professional engineer, he applies his skills to build real audio equipment the same way The Greats did generations before him.
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On the build:
We do not mass produce products or outsource to factories overseas. Our joy is to prototype, build, test and package the equipment ourselves.
We do not engineer our builds to use the cheapest components. We build using top quality components, not because expensive means better, but because quality and precision means longer lasting components and a better user experience.