We had a wonderful day on Friday visiting our good friends at Deco Audio in Aylesbury.
Deco Audio is a well established and hugely respected dealer stocking a wide range of excellent brands. In addition to a carefully chosen range of products across all budgets, they also have a massive selection of vinyl.
We took our pre-amplifier along to Peter at Deco to get his impressions and because it's always nice to spend time talking about music and Hi-Fi.
We set off in Lucy's 1958 Austin A35 at about 8am and had a really smooth journey to Aylesbury. Parking for Deco Audio couldn't be easier, there's a huge car park just over the road. Peter made us all coffee and we sat down to chat about some exciting plans he has for the coming months. Deco Audio has always been a place where the emphasis is on visitors feeling welcome to drop in for a coffee and a conversation, and while we can't say too much at this stage, we're sure his plans will enhance this experience. The effect is a real sense of community for the patrons and Peter's calm, friendly approach is key to this. We watched nervously as Peter opened the flight case up and took his first look at our product. He made some kind comments on the presentation (and we breathed sighs of relief!), before lifting the unit out, placing it on the counter and remarking that it was bigger than he imagined. After looking over the outside of the case, we offered to take the lid off so he could see inside. It was at that point that we realised we had forgotten to bring a screwdriver. Fortunately, the single screw which holds the lid in place can be undone with a coin, but it did get us talking about supplying a special tool with the unit, and we're working on that now!
Once we had the lid off, we were flattered when Peter called down Deco's in-house engineer James (Deco Audio boasts its own in house service department, how cool is that?!) to take a look at the wiring and lacing. Everybody loves the wiring and lacing...
We talked about the development of our product: how we designed our own bobbins to allow us greater flexibility in transformer design, how we listened to many different types of wiring before deciding on the Jupiter 26AWG cotton covered wire and about how we looked at every single part of our design and tried every possible option to make sure music sounds as good as it possibly can.
We then took the pre-amplifier upstairs to the demo room and plugged it in using a Project CD BOX transport, an Audio Note DAC, Audion Silver Knight power amplifier and a set of ProAc Studio 148 loudspeakers. The sound was effortless, detailed and dynamic and we enjoyed listening to a few different artists - including Buke and Gase. We hadn't heard them before, but we have gig tickets on the way now!
We chatted about returning in the new year to demonstrate our pre-amplifier for an afternoon and evening session, where anyone who is interested in listening can come along and enjoy some music with a coffee or a glass of wine. If this sounds like something you'd like to join us for, please let Deco Audio know, or give us a call.
We set off back to Hastings just after lunch time and ended up in the inevitable rush hour traffic, but the sun was shining, we'd had a lovely morning, we had some new ideas to discuss and we'd found some new music, so we had nothing to complain about at all!
Thanks to Peter and all at Deco Audio. We had a brilliant time. You can read Peter's thoughts here.
