Neil McCauley
28-10-2015, 09:36
John ... in the audiophile world Benchmark Media have entered quickly and built a terrific reputation from scratch. Very impressive. However from your perspective, how do you see the differences between studio buyers and audiophile end users?
The short answer is that audiophiles talk more. Audiophiles are passionate about their love for music and music reproduction. Studio buyers share this passion, but rarely have as much time available to discuss the details of their audio chain.
The long answer is that Benchmark has made two market transitions:
We began 25 years ago by manufacturing audio equipment for television networks. These networks have hundreds of audio devices in the distribution chain and we specialized in building audio distribution amplifiers that could be cascaded with minimal damage to the audio. To achieve these goals we built products that measured +0/-3dB 0.1Hz to 500 kHz, with THD+N less than 0.0003%, and with a SNR of 125 dB. Our goal was to build the highly-transparent audio products that the television networks needed. They needed this performance so that they could achieve reasonable performance through extremely long and complicated audio chains.
We expanded our operation by introducing extremely transparent audio devices for studio applications. These included microphone preamplifiers, D/A converters, and A/D converters.
Finally we began selling our professional D/A and A/D converters to audiophiles who appreciated our intense emphasis on sonic transparency.
Are you a DAC chip maker and if so are your chips made to your specification i.e. proprietary – or do you buy third-party off the shelf so to speak?
We .....
Continue at http://www.hifianswers.com/2015/08/complete-benchmark-media-interviews-john-siau-howard-popeck/
The short answer is that audiophiles talk more. Audiophiles are passionate about their love for music and music reproduction. Studio buyers share this passion, but rarely have as much time available to discuss the details of their audio chain.
The long answer is that Benchmark has made two market transitions:
We began 25 years ago by manufacturing audio equipment for television networks. These networks have hundreds of audio devices in the distribution chain and we specialized in building audio distribution amplifiers that could be cascaded with minimal damage to the audio. To achieve these goals we built products that measured +0/-3dB 0.1Hz to 500 kHz, with THD+N less than 0.0003%, and with a SNR of 125 dB. Our goal was to build the highly-transparent audio products that the television networks needed. They needed this performance so that they could achieve reasonable performance through extremely long and complicated audio chains.
We expanded our operation by introducing extremely transparent audio devices for studio applications. These included microphone preamplifiers, D/A converters, and A/D converters.
Finally we began selling our professional D/A and A/D converters to audiophiles who appreciated our intense emphasis on sonic transparency.
Are you a DAC chip maker and if so are your chips made to your specification i.e. proprietary – or do you buy third-party off the shelf so to speak?
We .....
Continue at http://www.hifianswers.com/2015/08/complete-benchmark-media-interviews-john-siau-howard-popeck/