Why Wattson Audio?
The first glimpse tells you that our products, Wattson Audio products, are different – but beyond the fact that they are astonishingly small (especially given their astonishing capabilities) it doesn’t tell you the ‘why’ or the ‘what’ that actually makes them so different. For that you have to look at the thinking behind them and how that extends to what’s on the inside.
« Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication »
Leonardo da Vinci
We established our credentials and gained years of invaluable experience as design consultants to some of the audio world’s biggest and highest profile brands: the sort of brands where owners spend more on a single cable to connect them up than we expect you to spend on a complete product.
We witnessed those brands applying established approaches and engineering, manufacturing techniques and standards to entirely new technologies, musical media and formats. That’s what convinced us to leverage our expertise and experience with the goal of producing products that owed more to the future than to the past: that maximised performance and value; that took a ‘clean sheet’ approach to the problems confronting not just musical performance, but the very existence and justification for high-end audio in today’s world. That was the genesis of and established the ethos for Wattson Audio, a range of practical, high-performance, space, energy and materials efficient products that bring genuine high-end audio down to affordable price levels.
Love your music – love your planet
It’s the ultimate exercise in value-engineering: spending the right amount of the budget on the things that really matter – and eliminating the things that don’t.
Today’s best digital and streaming products can be as dependent on software as they are on hardware. By leveraging the power of software to govern the behavior of DSP and DAC devices, you create circuits that are upgradable and future-proof, protecting your investment and minimizing redundancy. But you also maximise their adaptability and versatility. Without sophisticated software, products like the Emerson and Madison simply couldn’t exist or perform as they do. But that software (and its associated engineering) also creates opportunities to grasp and pitfalls to avoid…
A sophisticated DSP driven volume control can outperform a basic analog pot – and it costs nothing.
Energy efficient, switch-mode power-supplies are becoming increasingly common, but not all switch-mode supplies are created equal. Why select an off the shelf unit with dubious or inconsistent performance, when better options are available and cost much the same.
Smaller casework offers substantial mechanical advantages, uses fewer resources to manufacture and costs less.
Local suppliers and manufacturing, lightweight products and low-volume packaging all reduce our carbon footprint.
By appreciating and incorporating the advantages of a genuinely alternative perspective, we can create a new world of high-end musical performance – undreamt of musical access and capabilities built into products that eliminate the huge costs, complexity and impracticality of traditional high-end separates systems.
One thing – done right
Each and every Wattson Audio product starts as a defined audio task, problem or challenge. We reduce that functionality to discrete, essential circuit blocks, engineered as simply as possible without compromising performance. We assemble those circuit blocks into an exactingly executed PCB, built into milled-from-solid casework. The end result is the simplest, cleanest path from proposition A to solution B, in a product that’s as compact and efficient as possible. This might be ‘high-end’ writ small. It might not be the ‘high-end’ you expect. But once you listen to a Wattson Audio product, you’ll realise just how high-end it really is.
With their advanced circuitry and diminutive dimensions, the Wattson Audio products offer a new take on high-end audio – one that embraces the future, learns the lessons of the past but leaves the historical baggage behind.