GOLDMUND - Swiss Made High-End Audio Equipment

Philosophy sounds pretty pretentious… We rather discuss here our basic principles for developing our products, so Goldmund aficionados can easier understand why they are the way they are.

Goldmund is a different audio manufacturer.

More business oriented, better organized and more advanced in technology than most of the High-End Audio other manufacturers, Goldmund advantageous position is based on few simple principles we adopted from the beginning:

R&D for a new product is a 5 years cycle.

If you want to make the best, you have to prepare it long time in advance.

Sometimes, you even have to create new technologies (“Mechanical Grounding”, “Thermal Grounding”, Real Time Microphone), which is immensely expensive and extensive.

Goldmund has the reputation to be among the longest planning companies in Audio. See the time it took us to come to digital! We saw the first digital products coming in 1985, and we agreed immediately with the potential. But our first digital product, the Mimesis 10, came only in 1990. And our first CD turntable only in 1993! Both were winners, but late ones.

You can say we are slow. It is true we do not accept to follow the market, issuing new products each time a new fancy idea gets in the mood. We prefer to follow a clear and pre-determined development path based on real technology development, trying to avoid sharp turns.

This protects our customers. They pay for having the best and would not understand if we had to change our position each morning, as many others do…

Imagine that, at Goldmund, we have to be the best in every field, analog, digital, mechanics, cables, speakers, audio computers, etc…

To be the best, there is only one way: we have to have the top existing developper, the key R&D guys in the world, working for us, and that has to be true in each field of the technology.

Being Goldmund, we need the best mechanical designer, the best cable specialist, the best analog circuit designer, the best D/A converter specialist, the best Speaker designer, etc…

But we cannot afford to have all the world top specialist in all these disciplines on our payroll full time, no way! Especially if it is a small development only.

So, the only solution is for us to contract some of our development to external engineers, selected for their top knowledge in the required field, each one paid only by project.

If other High-end Audio manufacturers make one single thing well, they are already lucky!

Most of them depend on a single (often the owner!) development guy. Lucky if he is not also selling and managing (so-so)…

The best among these manufacturers may have their development guy making only research, but they are working full time for them anyhow. The largest have 2 or 3, maximum. We work with nearly 20.

Also, keeping their R&D guy inside a single organization is, sooner or later, making them loose the contact with recent technology, other fields and other brilliant guys. Brain sclerosis is unavoidable!

If the developer is also the owner, the sclerosis is usually terminal, since he cannot accept his own limitations. His product is his baby, it can’t be bad!

The Goldmund solution is a widely accepted solution in very dynamic industries, where technology evolves fast. Using some external engineers, you leave them rejuvenate between the contract they make for you, by working on something different, in a different field. And you also rejuvenate your internal guys, by osmosis.

How do you think we discovered the Mechanical Grounding? By having a turntable design engineer coming from the machine-tools industry! And how did we get our new Speaker Cable technology? By having it designed by one of the top specialist in TV antennas!

And do not forget that, using research sub-contracting, we can afford the best guys, because we pay them only when they work for us!

Music brings pleasure. To do so, composers, performers and even sound recording engineers have worked their way.

Reproduction is only here to reproduce… It should not be part of the artistic creation.

Equipment made for sounding “nicer” will always sound identical, instead of faithful.

We, at Goldmund, do not believe lies - only the truth. However, we know that recognizing where the real truth is means perfect knowledge! Which is not human..

So trying to remain modest, we accept progress only when it is scientifically explainable, documented, measurable (more about that later), and we refuse mystics. A better sound is for us suspect if it cannot be reliably correlated with an improved measurable parameter.

The problem in listening to an Audio component is the automatic compensation made by the brain.

If High-End Audio Manufacturers tell you they have to design their product by listening, it means they believe Audio is Magic and cannot be measured.

Don’t believe them…Everything is measurable. So, send them back to school!

When we listen (yes, we do too!), it is only to check one parameter at a time, and only to be able to correlate it with measurement.

You cannot tune a whole product like that.

We, at Goldmund, absolutely never listen to our components before releasing them to the market. But we have a pretty good idea on how they will sound, because we do measure them…

Audio Science is immense. The level, bandwidth, speed of signals is so much more extended than in any other electronics field that the necessary knowledge probably exceeds a single human capacity.

This is why we do all our development with large teams.

We are modest, learning more everyday, but still knowing we know nothing.

Thanks God, if competition knows even less…

Music is essentially analog. You can't change that

When Goldmund was, 30 years ago, manufacturing only LP players, there was no doubt analog was our domain. Of course then CD came as a revolution and after a long evaluation, we took great care to manufacture better solutions to read the (then imporoving) CDs and convert these new digital sources into the beautiful analog domain.

For 20 years, the dispute of analogue vs digital has animated audiophiles circles with passion. And when we introduced our first universal preamplifiers, working in the digital domain, we generated a burst of protestation among the purists (especially from those who never heard them, by the way)...

Why did we decide to use so much digital and not remain (blindly) analog ?

The real reason is that the difficult process of analog signal preamplification as well as the long analog cables needed to carry these delicate signals are extremely detrimental to the final quality. Accumulating losses, colorations and distortion, with no way to correct them. Some basic measurements proved us easily this was a dead end and other solutions needed to be developed.

With the better knowledge accumulated for 20 years in digital process, we found the easiest way was to use the digital domain to transport the analog signal and protect it from this degradation.

Technology to avoid a digital signal to be degraded in a long cable is now reachable at reasonable cost. Volume control when properly designed as a simple multiplication in a DSP is totally harmless and 1000 times more precise than anything equivalent in analog. And since the signal originally entered in a system is now very often in the digital domain, the simplest solution was to maintain and process the signal in the digital domain until it reaches the power amplifier, as close as possible from the speakers.

Doing so, we literally wrap the delicate analog signal in a digital envelop which is used to suffer the process and the transport without damaging the analog content inside. The quality improvement, when digital technology is applied with extreme care, is dramatic enough to justify the effort, and even dramatic enough to convert existing analog source to digital and insert them in the enveloppe, still gaining substantially in final analog quality !

So, do not worry ! We do not like more than you bad digital sounds... We only use the evil digital domain for what it is good at, and to issue at the end of the process an immaculate analog sound cleaner and softer than you ever dreamed was possible.

In brief we do not love digital, we rather enslave it to better protect your delicate analog signals where life for them is difficult...