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.