GOLDMUND - Swiss Made High-End Audio Equipment

We were quite anxious to get the first customer reactions after delivering our first Millenniums. The less we can say is the real level of astonishment we got from them. First for the sound quality, so improved they did not believe it uses the JOB circuit, already known in the Mimesis 29 and 29.4 (in fact the Millennium uses the JOB 3, the latest development level). And also for the beautiful graphics and computer interface, and the advanced technology for the first time packed inside an Audio Product.

Time to celebrate for us and also time to consider getting the improvements we got, especially the JOB 3 circuit (see the JOB Website for description) declined to more accessible versions…

Thanks to a recent strong help from the JOB design team, we now expect to be able to present the A20 quite soon and include it later this year in some of our top units.

More expensive to build and finished with a thick plating of real Platinum white Gold, the A20 offers lower distortion, reduced noise and a much improved Power supply noise rejection. When available, It should push the already legendary Goldmund preamps to new summits.

The Goldmund module progression during the last 16 years

Making its first DVD machine was not easy for Goldmund.

What was the level of quality to expect ? What will be the sound quality from CD’s ? etc..

In fact, we expected quite a few bad reactions from customers using our first machine.

But the first DVD Easy were very well received, so we had to increase our production far more than expected to match the demand.

Despite the very basic design, despite the lack of fancy pseudo-technical arguments (something competition loves to do about such a widely ignored technology), the Easy DVD received positive and encouraging comments as a very musical sound and subtle picture player.

Especially notable is the near unanimity we made on the first principle we applied : make it a turntable only : no multi-channel decoder inside (this has to be a separate device). No built-in D/A, because you will soon have more than one Digital source (CD transport, DVD transport, Satellite, Digital Radio, Computer, etc..) so the share of a good external D/A or digital preamplifier looks far more logical than separate D/A in each source device, each of them of necessarily lower quality. Our customers love the idea that what they buy is what they use, nothing more.

So, after this first success, Goldmund has now decided to push the DVD development faster and, folks, here comes Eidos…

We did not expect it to be so soon, but the majority of our customers are now asking for their top CD transports to be able also to play DVD’s, especially music DVD (which, by the way, are sounding dramatically better than DVD Audio and SACD, at least as they now exist …).

More, after the successful introduction of the Goldmund Easy DVD, it was clear that the next machine to come should be a great DVD but also quite a good CD player.

All conditions were present : replacing the Mimesis 36 and 39, our top CD transports was needed for ages, the DVD technology developed for the Easy DVD was quite easy to push much higher in performance, and our first Video product (the Goldmund Video Processor, more about it soon !) showed us several ways to improve the traditional component Video and S-Video outputs for a DVD (no MacroVision, low impedance switching, etc…).

In brief, you should see the prototype of the Eidos 38 in our next newsletter.

Why a new name, why Eidos ? It is another reference made by Goldmund to our common cultural roots, the ancient Greek : in ancient Greek, Eidos means the perfection of the image, meaning the perfection of the visual reproduction. After the Mimesis family, a clear indication of the new Home-Theater domain we are entering…