History of Product Development

At Vertex AQ, we now manufacture a very extensive range of products. In the early days we started off by manufacturing the Jaya mains filter, shortly followed by the Kinabalu Support System. Then came all the different cable types and mains products that are necessary for wiring up any system from end to end.

But for us the development of our products was always driven by the goal of unlocking lost performance in the electronics and speakers of a system, rather than thinking that you could just keep making a cable better say, by just thinking about it in isolation.

Lets look at some examples.

When we finished developing the proper theories and technology for the Kinabalu Support Systems, we had gained a very deep understanding of acoustic paths, acoustic impedance matching, acoustic labyrinths and so-on. Its these theories that make the Kinabalu work so well and when you put a CD player onto a Kinabalu with the Vertex coupler and decouplers, the improvement in performance is significant. But if you take a close look at the reality of this CD player, firstly you observe that its a typical metal box, and that vibration within that box can be drained out into the Kinabalu through the decoupling cone. But it then occurred to us that at the back of the player we have all the input and output sockets, and the sockets are connected directly to our sensitive circuits. So what would happen, we thought, if you use these sockets to drain out more acoustic vibration - directly from the circuits themselves. So we did more R&D. We worked out that if you used the right type of conductor, you could use it to carry vibration away from the circuits inside the box, and then you could trap that vibration in an acoustic labyrinth built onto the cable. When we tried it, it worked brilliantly - hence the birth of the Vertex cables with all the acoustic modules.

We had also worked out quite quickly that the circuit of a mains filter was microphonic - its the same in essence as all the circuitry in any box of electronics. So we built the circuits of our filters directly onto their own acoustic labyrinth - and they sounded much better. But the next thing that happened was even more interesting. Once we understood the relationship between the filter circuit, vibration, and the process to remove it, we found that this now changed our thinking about the design of the filter circuit itself. So further improvements there led to even more performance!

The next major development was how we built up our understanding of all the common threads that ran through our research, and how they were so significant at a system level. We had the basics of RFI and microphony sorted out, but what proved to be far more crucial overall, was when you stepped back and looked at the bigger picture - and realised just how interactive RFI and microphony is, and how it can be generated in one place, but travel around the system and pull down the performance somewhere entirely different. This knowledge began to change significantly the structure and logic of the product range, and how to manage the upgrade process effectively. This of course became the Systematic Approach.

The final thing of great interest in this development story is how we pushed the boundaries even further with new technology. Once we realised just how fantastic the performance improvements were, when you applied the Systematic Approach, we looked in ever more detail at other possible methods to get even further reductions in RFI and microphony. Here we found new ideas from the defence industry such as Radar Absorbent Materials (RAM) and combined them with further developments of our own techniques. And this led to the development to the HiRez range of products - which simply release quite staggering performance from your electronics and speakers.

So those are really the fundamental milestones so far. But what's the next big thing in this process? Well, putting all this thinking right into the design of a major piece of electronics. And that is what we are doing next with the Aletheia dac-1. Find out more here.