GOLDMUND - Swiss Made High-End Audio Equipment

The Goldmund Eidos Reference received its consecration by appearing on the cover of the last issue of Stereo Sound, the best Audio magazine in Japan as most proeminent current new product worldwide.

This issue is also giving its “Grand Prix” to the Mimesis 24 as the best two channel preamp (Stereo Sound is concentrating on 2 channel equipment).

In addition, the Mimesis 30 received from HiVi, the sister magazine dedicated to Home Theater, its own “Grand Prix”. Which shows that these machines (they both use the same circuit) have succeeded being totally universal and considerably better than previous preamps or processors.

Congratulations to our team of Stellavox Japan for this exceptional achievement.

The Ultimate family of Goldmund amplifiers is expanding withe the announcement on Dec 1st of the Goldmund Telos 600, a mono amplifier, the first of a new amplifier family based on the JOB5 circuit.

Telos in old greek means the unstoppable telluric power of earth, the cosmic force.

The new JOB5 circuit is not a small improvement but a totally new circuit far more advanced than the JOB4, providing an even more natural sound, with extreme dynamics and ultra-refined detail.

The Telos 600 sets also a new reference in practicality. The amplifier comes standard with analogue (both RCA and XLR) and digital (RCA In and out) inputs, a precise input step-attenuator, 2 x 5-way binding post and 2 x Goldmund Coaxial Speaker cable connectors, Auto-start signal sensing circuit (with built-in 10 amps sequencer) and Ground floating option switch.

The Telos 600 is also the safest power amplifier ever designed by Goldmund with an extreme protection level against mishandling (Short-circuit of outputs even with full power, AC extreme swing or temporary drop, DC offset, HF oscillation, etc…) providing a considerably improved safety of operation.

The amplifier is built following the “Mechanical Grounding” principles like other Goldmund Ultimate Line components, but to an even higher degree. Noticeable especially is the now fully separate input and output stages circuits to avoid the critical mechanical feedback between the high and low current sections. The amplifier’s “Thermal Grounding” has also been improved with a twice bigger gold-plated pure copper “Thermal Buffer” than before.

The Telos 600 will become available in batch production by late February 2005.

The SR8 Universal Preamplifier uses digital outputs so the SR amp family had to adopt a digital input as the Mimesis 18.4 and the new Telos 600. The new SR150 is based on an SR2.3 with an additional D/A Alize 4 circuit.

Performance-wise, the new amp is identical to the SR2.3 and it may still be used, of course, with the analogue inputs. The new digital input is providing a good protection against obsolescence, the trend being obviously to go for digital links with the preamplifiers, much more acccurate and much more reliable with cables aging or very long cables.

The new SR150 will be available by end of January 2005.

With the new Universal Preamplifier concept, a lot of new capabilities are becoming available for controlling a system. Among them is the possibility to include speaker filtering and room correction inside the Mimesis 24 Preamplifier.

Individually adjusted per channel in the system configurator (see above), the number and type of filters are making the system ideal for electronic crossover, speaker protection, speaker correction or room correction applications. A first set of functions will be accessible by a simple exchange of software in the Mimesis 24 but the number of possible filters then remains very small, limiting the applications to special speaker protection (for the Full Epilogue for example) or simple electronic crossover. A more advanced kit is in preparation which includes a hardware plug-in and another software which is far more powerful for very complex configurations or room acoustics correction.

The illegal resale of Goldmund products transhipped from country to country or sold without serial numbers by unscrupulous dealers (nobody knows if these products are new or not), is disturbing the good reputation of our products in some of the south-east Asian countries, and we decided to help our local distribution network and the local jsutice to stop it at once.

The first measure already taken was to limit the Goldmund Warranty to the original dealer who bought the machine from us. If a customer acquires a machine from a non-official dealer he will be refused warranty and will receive service only at the distributor discretion, leisure, and price… We strongly recommend our official distributors to charge the service in such a case at full cost with any margin they find proper to apply. It means that, if you buy such a product, it may finally cost you far more than a regularely distributed unit. In addition, any Goldmund product which comes without its original serial number will also be refused for service by all the Goldmund official network, and even by the factory…

The second measure is even more drastic and will be applied progressively to the whole product line. A special routine will be included in the software to make them unusable (and mostly even unrepairable) if they are not installed by a Goldmund official dealer or distributor. And be aware that the system will be unbreakable, even by very good software hackers… And of course nobody will announce which machines received the feature…

Now you are aware of the risks.

We will do everything as usual to help our official distribution network to provide the best possible assitance to their customers. But if you think smarter to buy your Goldmund product from a unauthorized source to get a big discount, think twice. You are taking exceptional risk to loose the financial advantage, or even the whole product. If you are not finishing in jail because these networks are specializing in reselling stolen products, and we now have the way to find those easily, even without serial numbers…

The War just started…