Founded in 2009, Thrax Audio is a leading manufacturer of electronics and speakers.

“While visiting some trend setting factories in Japan a while back one thing caught my attention. There was quietness and space, there were people, no robots and automation and certainly no stress. The management regarded their old experienced workers as their most valuable asset, not the latest technology or piece of kit. They would use the master craftsmen as a council of elders to advise on key decisions and their implementation. These master craftspeople mentored a group of young recruits, where all the creative initiative and daily management was done by young and eager highly educated workers. This synergy between creativity and experience gave them an edge through faultless implementation of any new ideas using the trouble free scaling of production. Coming to think of it further, this is age old wisdom. We see the same in the army and in any old craft. There are masters and apprentices that eventually supersede their masters by adding their own to the already accumulated knowledge. Any battle will be instigated by politicians, planned by generals but fought by the soldiers from whom the new generals will emerge. When forming the team at Thrax I have aimed at observing those guidelines. Our team has members with life long experience in the fields of electronics and acoustics but also being ardent audiophiles all the time. Their knowledge and experience extends to areas not covered in any current academic curriculum. The other part of the team are recently graduated young professionals driven by the passion for audio and educated to the latest trends and cutting edge technologies. The team has drive and creativity coming from young engineers with the error correction and wisdom of experience of the elders. A combination we see as unique in our field. This way no aspect is overlooked during product design as each team member has a different specialty that adds to the whole. Everyone sees the product from a different angle. Often a creator gets blinded in self delusion and this is where a team is needed to ground the flight of ones wishful imagination and reset its compass bearing. This is also the atmosphere where a seed idea quickly grows into a major technological advance. Even with all that experience in the team we know we don’t know everything. We do not pretend to do and we are not afraid to ask. Knowing who and what to ask is the key for success.”

“Many years of exploration in the world of high quality audio passed before we realized we can’t buy the product that satisfied all our needs. The need to develop our own audio components emerged by blending the best properties of what we have heard. We gained experience from all the available technologies and amplification circuits making headlines through the years and gradually filtered them down to a list of worthy contenders.

Some products incorporated true innovation but these innovations were usually only a partial cure making the product no better than the average. Ingenious approaches coupled with off-the-shelf peripherals and average manufacturing quality was the norm, as well as a lack of understanding of the entire system as a whole.

We listened – we researched – and this resulted in an unexpectedly long and strenuous R&D project in our own lab evaluating amplification topologies and circuits and the interaction with other components.

Numerous prototypes were built, studied, and some destroyed until a pattern and a theory emerged.

This was followed by hands-on research and tests on the influence of various components and their sonic qualities, involving thousands of man-hours of measurements, auditioning and comparisons.

We spent a considerable amount of time on the mechanical construction of our products concentrating on vibration control, electromagnetic and electrostatic shielding. We have not discovered a loophole in the laws of physics. What we found is that people quickly forget the achievements of past times, just to “discover” them again at a much later date. It is all there, you just have to put it together. We look for the simplest meaningful legacy solutions, find their flaws and fix them if we can. It does not matter how much better a modern solution is if it is based on flawed assumptions and only glosses over past errors. True to our beliefs we decided to use the works and experience of the very best and implemented their knowledge in our product. It took a lot of time and many tests to determine where the truth lies.

Taking advantage of available 21st century technologies and materials allowed us to achieve what early designers called fiction. We could write pages upon pages as to why each component in our products is there, and why it was chosen.

Actually, there is no trick, no magic. It is a complex function of knowledge, attention to detail, common sense and an open mind that gets you there.”

Rumen Artarski, Founder and Chief Designer of Thrax Audio.