I’ve been running SoundStage! for more than 30 years, and I believe that I’ve visited more hi‑fi companies than any other hi‑fi writer during that time. So, not surprisingly, it’s getting harder and harder to impress me. That might sound like I’m jaded, but I’m not, or at least I don’t think I am; it’s simply a byproduct of having seen so much. Still, MSB Technology did more than impress me on my recent visit—it blew my mind in a way I never thought a boutique-type hi‑fi company could. I also learned a few new things.
The trip
As I wrote last month, at the end of February I traveled to California along with the SoundStage! video team. A couple of days after our arrival in Los Angeles, we headed north along the coast to Watsonville, roughly an hour south of San Francisco. Our destination was MSB Technology, which was founded in 1987 by Mark S. Brasfield. The founder’s initials explain the company name, but there’s an obvious secondary meaning for anyone familiar with the digital-audio initialism: MSB stands for most significant bit. MSB’s roots are in digital-audio products, but over time the company has expanded into other hi‑fi electronics as well.
Left to right: Jonathan Gullman, Doug Schneider, Daniel Francis, and Dustin Symanski
For about ten years now, the company has been owned by brothers Daniel Francis and Jonathan Gullman, along with longtime employee Dustin Symanski. While MSB’s history stretches back nearly 40 years, it’s the work this trio has done over the past decade that left me astonished and that defines the company today.
Why we visit
There are two reasons we make it a priority to visit manufacturers. Over the past ten years, much of our travel has been to gather video footage for company- and product-focused features on our YouTube channel. But for almost 30 years, I’ve also made these visits for another reason: to see firsthand how a company’s products are made, and to meet the people behind them. Seeing a finished component at a show or receiving one for review is one thing; learning how it comes to life is something else entirely. Both reasons factored into this visit.
Before arriving at MSB Technology, I had mostly encountered its products at hi‑fi shows. I’d also seen photos of the factory on the company’s website. But as I told the three owners after arriving, those images don’t do the factory justice. They’re accurate and well shot, but they fail to convey just how much design work and manufacturing takes place there. That said, my own photos still might not fully do the trick, but I’m hoping that, combined with these descriptions and our upcoming videos, they’ll help improve readers’ and viewers’ understanding of the company and the place.
First impressions
From the outside, the building is a well-kept, single-story industrial structure with a distinctly Californian look—one that, to my eye, carries a hint of Western influence. There’s no outward indication that it houses a highly specialized hi‑fi company. Inside the main entrance, that impression doesn’t change—the offices and lunchroom wouldn’t look out of place in a small accounting or engineering firm: modern, clean, and thoughtfully designed. Off to the side of one of these offices is a well-designed, attractive listening room featuring the company’s electronics (of course), which during our visit were connected to a pair of Estelon Forza speakers. The listening room has an astonishing number of acoustic diffusors on nearly every surface except the carpeted floor. Within the front part of the facility, that listening room is the only hint that something really interesting happens here.
Past the offices is a door leading into the factory area, and that’s where the real surprise begins. The space opens into two very large work areas. One is dedicated primarily to circuit-board population, product assembly, quality control, and warehousing; the other is mostly devoted to metal-part manufacturing.
In-house manufacturing at surprising scale
I wasn’t expecting MSB Technology to be making as many of the parts for its products as it does. The circuit-board population alone represents a serious investment in equipment and labor, though a number of companies I’ve visited have had similar capabilities. What took me by complete surprise was the extent of the metal fabrication. Most hi‑fi companies outsource most, if not all, of their metalwork—sometimes locally, sometimes across the country, and sometimes overseas—because it’s difficult, messy work that requires specialized machinery and skills. Doing it in-house demands millions of dollars’ worth of equipment, along with the infrastructure and staffing to support it.
Despite having a staff of only about 15 people, including the three owners, MSB Technology does exactly that. Cutting, machining, milling, and whatever other preparation is necessary of the mostly huge, heavy aluminum slabs used for their products is done right there in Watsonville. One aspect of metal production they don’t handle on-site is anodizing, which requires its own specialized processes and equipment. But even then, that work is done by suppliers in California, typically firms serving the nearby Silicon Valley tech industry.
Why it’s done this way
One must wonder why MSB Technology invests so heavily in making nearly everything in-house—particularly the metalwork—when outsourcing could be cheaper and more efficient. From what I learned, there are several reasons, not all of which are pertinent to this article. But one very pertinent reason is that the three owners are hardcore engineers who genuinely enjoy creating things. Jonathan and Dustin are both electrical engineers, so they design all of the company’s circuits in-house and want them made there. Daniel is a mechanical engineer, and his enthusiasm for manufacturing technologies and industrial design goes a long way toward explaining the exemplary craftsmanship and refined appearance current MSB Technology products exhibit. At one point he casually said, “I just really like making stuff.”
Another reason is so that they can control almost every aspect of quality, which is a big deal in manufacturing. You don’t know how many companies I’ve been to where quality-control problems originate with outside vendors over which these companies often have limited control. In-house manufacturing mitigates that—provided you have the equipment and personnel to execute properly. Daniel told me there was definitely a learning curve to getting where they are today, but that they now feel their expertise is so advanced they can make parts and entire products without compromise. And indeed, the build and finish quality of MSB’s products are among the best I’ve seen anywhere.
The three owners are also proud to say that their products are not only fully made in the USA, but in California. In fact, a Republic of California flag flies proudly in the metal shop.
Clocking, DAC design, and obsession about detail
MSB is well known in hi‑fi circles for designing its own digital-to-analog conversion circuits instead of using off-the-shelf chips, which is what most other manufacturers do. All MSB converter sections are based on a proprietary ladder-type architecture implemented into attractive gold-color metal-bar cases. Their circuit isn’t an R2R (resistor-ladder) circuit like most ladder DACs have. Instead, their solution uses a sophisticated, in-house-developed circuit design intended to overcome the traditional limitations of R2R-type ladder DACs—mainly the inherent linearity problems—but it’s still a ladder-type topology.
Sentinel DAC section side
While that converter design work alone is noteworthy, what stood out was the in-house design and construction of the DAC clock circuits, right down to the creation of the temperature-controlled environments in the circuits for crystal oscillators, and even working with crystal-oscillator makers to create exactly the parts they need. Again, there’s no off-the-shelf clock stuff here, which, to me, was the most eye-opening part of the trip, because I’d never been to a company before—at least as far as I know—that creates the actual clocks for their digital-to-analog converters essentially from the ground up. To do this, you not only need excellent manufacturing capabilities, but also exceptional design skills.
It’s Dustin Symanski who has those skills, and he is responsible for the design of the conversion circuitry, clocks, and probably a whole bunch of other stuff. Intrigued by Dustin’s deep knowledge and ability to explain things, I ended up talking to him about converter and clock design for, literally, a couple of hours. It was time well spent (at least for me!), because Dustin helped me fill in knowledge gaps about digital signal processing that I’d been mystified by for years. Before this trip, I had never found anyone with the combination of knowledge and temperament (i.e., patience) to explain this stuff to me.
Sentinel DAC section inside
Not quite as sophisticated from a technical point of view, but further illustrating the obsessive attention to detail (another instance of MSB’s we-make-it-here ethos), are the LED panels for the various DAC models’ front displays. Learning that they create their own panels wasn’t as noteworthy as learning they create their own clocks, but when I watched each LED being placed into its spot in a panel, my eyebrows went up—once again, I’ve never seen that done in-house before, which reinforced that at MSB, they are fanatical about every product part.
Attention to everything—even the swag
That borderline-obsessive attention to detail extends beyond the audio products themselves. At the end of our visit, we were given MSB Technology baseball caps. Chris Chitaroni, our chief videographer, and I both examined them closely, because they looked better than—and felt superior to—the usual promotional fare. Chris then remarked, “It’s nice to get a cap I’ll actually wear.” He often wears a cap—just not every cap he’s given. I rarely wear a cap, but I took this one with me recently for a vacation. The thoughtfulness of the design was unmistakable.
Specialization as a business strategy
Another reason for MSB’s emphasis on manufacturing capability has to do with what they are trying to sell: high-priced, boutique-type hi‑fi products (more on that below). In short, if you bring specialized hi‑fi like that to market, it had better be truly specialized. I’ve learned that not all expensive hi‑fi is actually that special—but MSB’s products seem to be.
That said, MSB hasn’t always been so special. MSB Technology has gone through several phases. In the early days, Mark Brasfield sold modified CD players under the MSB brand. Mind you, modifying and rebranding CD players wasn’t an uncommon business strategy in the 1980s. Back then, only a few huge companies, such as Philips, Sony, and Panasonic, could actually make CD players. The best a small company like MSB could do was modify one of these large companies’ players. At one point, MSB even experimented with lower-priced digital products manufactured offshore. They even dabbled in pro-audio products.
Today, MSB Technology focuses on four models of digital-to-analog converters and two lines of power amplifiers aimed exclusively at the high-end home hi‑fi market, all created with the kind of cost-no-object approach to circuit design and manufacturing I’ve described. But there is indeed a high cost to that approach. The least-expensive DAC in the lineup, the Discrete, is priced at US$12,500. It’s a normal-sized component (for a hi‑fi DAC) with a small external power supply. The newest DAC product, the Sentinel, is now the flagship, and it’s far from normal-sized or -priced. It carries a staggering price tag of US$375,000 and comprises three heavy cases—the main digital-to-analog-converter box, another box housing the digital-processing circuitry, and an external power supply—each the size of a power amplifier. MSB’s power amplifiers start at about US$29,500 for the S202 stereo amplifier and top out at US$145,000 for a pair of M500 mono amplifiers.
Jonathan, Daniel, and Dustin readily admitted to Chris and me that their friends and family can’t afford these products. Neither can most people, obviously. But well-heeled audiophiles can afford them—and clearly do buy them—as evidenced by what I witnessed at the company: success.
Ongoing investment
What convinced me that MSB is succeeding wasn’t what the owners told me; it was what I saw and learned while I was there—much of which I’ve described above—along with one key detail I haven’t yet mentioned: MSB owns its building and all of the equipment. Since acquiring MSB, their strategy has been to focus relentlessly on product development while continually reinvesting in the company’s infrastructure. The result is MSB Technology as it exists today—an unusually impressive operation by any standard.
And what MSB Technology is today exceeded my expectations by a wide margin. It remains a small company—just 15 employees—but one with outsized design and manufacturing capabilities and a level of attention to detail that can impress a seasoned (jaded, even) audiophile like me.
. . . Doug Schneider
das@soundstage.com
