Nagra Factory Tour!

[Music] [Music] we are in switzerland at the world headquarters of nagra audio technology switzerland and uh they also service the espresso machines i think that's interesting i didn't know that do you really do that yeah pascal the ceo owns a second business oh that's interesting okay and in we go thank you sir thank you welcome to niagara how are you are you i'm good i'm still here hello michael how are you yeah good to see you i survived my trip it's been great so welcome to niagara thank you so much pleasure to have you here it's great to be here the first time you were visiting us yes wow look at that it's official i was at the gym this morning so i'm feeling pretty good so now we're going to get the inaugural story from the beginning from the beginning yes i'm pascal i'm the ceo of audio technology switzerland so um what i will tell today is a little bit the story uh at the beginning what start with what started the company before the the 50s and in fact uh stephan could escape flew from poland during the war and went to france and after that during the occupation of the nazi in france he had to uh to escape also from france and went to switzerland in geneva where he started his studies and as a student he loved physics and he started electronic but it electronic didn't exist at the time so and how old was he at that time i was uh 16 17 when he really uh started to to think and uh he developed uh he was thinking during uh during this time to uh to create a um a computerized system or something like a computer to manage milling machines or turning machines because switzerland was very famous for that to do cnc machine yeah and it was before that the processors etc exists yeah there are no computers no no computer so and so his idea was that but there were no really uh big easy memory at the time so he was asking himself how can he store so many data and and so he saw that during the war uh the tape has been developed so he said it could be a great way to store data and so he started to study how to to manage to to make a device that could store data on on a tape but as binary code i mean that we had zeros and ones i don't know exactly i think it was more analog at the time i can imagine [Music] real as a memory for the mailing machine but it was i don't i think it was analog yes and but he had no money as a student so he said what can i store or i can as data on a tape that i could maybe sell in the future so i can continue to develop my my inventions and basically he said okay the sound could be a great great machine i could record sound and so after that i can sell this machine and i can sell my invention also to uh to the the swiss companies that are making the milling machines so this mechanical machine so when when he went to see this company the company started to laugh about it and said my dear students you are a young guy you don't understand anything about machines and cnc will never exist you know we are making mechanical machine we don't want to put tubes inside of this kind of machines so he came back with his invention he was a little bit we had a deception and it tried to go to the radio to sell his machine is the time the radio they had to to to make sound record there were a big track with two engineers to sound engineers plus a guy for uh to record or to uh as a reporter or the interviewer so when he presented this invention the engineer said no no you will not pass it's too dangerous for our job yeah so of course so he he he didn't know how to to make it happen so he saw that there were a competition that were organized by a radio a competition to find the new reporters of the future so he said i will apply for for this competition i will do it and he won because he made records that were nearly impossible to make at the time he went to paris to the board of notre dame and he made a special record there where he was on the top directly on the bell so that nearly nobody could do at the time because you had to have a truck with cables and everything it was impossible so he made it and he won and he could present directly to the directors to the direction of the companies his device and this is where it could happen and he could start to sell to make the company and he was so afraid that it was only uh one uh success that he didn't want to give his name on the on the company kudelski so he said in polling in polish but i will record it's nagaraj so he said i will call my company nagra i will record and this is how it started with nagra with this recorder that he started the company and finally he developed the rest that what marguerite said to you before what a great story that but right now we'd like to show you the what the analog the newer analog part the turntable and the hd folder and it's that way please okay your presentation was so good it was fun you were in mulcher so you are never familiar with the festival and uh its founder club nubs was a member of our board and a good friend to the kudaski family so we decided to pay a tribute to him and name our listening room after his game and clones was a great friend of course of music but also kind of a geek so he knew a lot about the youth buildings and it was very nice to have him to challenge us good combination this is your wall of awards yes some of them some of them and we are happy we are very honored to receiving them and we have some of our recordings also not this one unfortunately yeah i was gonna ask you what's the connection with uh with tears from here i'm a big fan of bob clear mountain and you know he mixed women in chains yeah and i'm a drummer and i'm fan of phil collins as well so okay it's more it's for me to know where it is all the time and we also want to show some products that are too discontinued but that we we used to love and we don't forget so yes this is the new hd funnel that you saw in in munich so you have input transformer that you can have 20 db or 26 db of gain after that you go to ef 806 microphone soup and you have a few other gain stage so you can reach 70 db of gain full tube and you have a function at the front with the impedance let's say 35 50. 60 and you can go very high so it is pretty cool because you can do on the remote you can so you can access it from the front and by remote as well yes you have other curves also there's many input at the back so you can have more than one input for funnel and uh everything is as direct as possible so on the turntable you have the cartridge you go on the silver wire from crystal cable and you go directly to the back of the funnel stage without any connection and we have an option if you need to have xlr you can go through a limo and have xlr input with balance i want to show you i think i show you in munich but you it's not on video let's say you have a bun here it's a bouncy floor because we are in second floor and on the factory so it's not like a solid the concrete so you can you can move dance the woofer will not move yeah yeah there's nothing happening and how is that a pneumatic suspension what exactly what is it it is spring it's hydraulic spring with silicone oil but it's the weight of the floating chassis and the fact that it's large so it's about three hertz the isolation so you never see the woofer moving from the floor or from the subwoofer or from anything so the resolution is much higher if you compare with other concept and prototype we did you can reach a really high resolution sound the the torn arms also let me just say something before for the viewers this is a prototype of the turntable we have two right now running in montreal so we had to take the original one so the parts are really not finished and nice as they should be so just how many of these are you planning to make we will make 70 of them they are numbered and so that's about 100 with the distributors versions uh later on we'll continue with a regular call reference production not the anniversary and this one oh so this is 70 anniversary issues but you'll continue making it will be slightly different in terms of aesthetics right uh sonically would be identical but the anniversary is just 70. okay so i can show maybe some people don't uh don't know about the platter so we can show also the watch style of it that is unique for the 70th anniversary so there's only 70 that will be built that way the platter is exam maybe if not so you can explain what is exam yeah exam is a is an is a metal alloy that is made was made by a french school called le min for the european center uh agency for space like the nasa and it was used on the inside mission to mars by the nasa so it's a material that is very uh it doesn't have vibration it's some kind of quality for bioversion and you will show you the same one in aluminium we have we made a lot of different tests on different material the one in aluminium will ring because yeah it's aluminum like a metallophone is made of aluminum plates you know this one doesn't so and it has also a very high density so we have weight distribution around the platter right and this uh technologist material is not new but we we are the first audio company to use it and we also have exclusivity on that for audio application and it was really interesting because if you compare with copper and other popular thing for platter if you compare by sound it don't sound dead or you know you don't kill the music so this was we did many tests and we it was so good that we use also inside the cartridge that's the real test is not to over damp it so you kill the music and not to under damp it so all these extraneous vibrations come through and muddy the sound but that's that's a listening thing as much as anything and that's critical well i think the the work on rnd work on that turntable was 50 50. you usually on electronic maybe it's 70 technically and 30 for test listening tests on the turntable there was no choice sometime we think it will be better we test it and the worst thing that we think it will work did work better so yeah and every material that you put into a turntable makes a difference everything yes so on the on the controller here you can change the speed directly like this you can have here plus or minus so you can lower or have more speed directly or you can put back to reference that is a crystal that you can find soon or that is a factory set there's a few features now is this a dedicated stand or is this someone else's stand that you're using you will see the kind of the the stand we did for it with muslim uh in montreal we have two tables there with the staff so what what do you have in montreux that's what you have a display there or yes maybe but so you can explain more yeah you know because of the unique history of nagra and montreux we have one turntable with a full negra classic funnel classic preamp in the room called the library it's in the lake house and they have the whole collection of records made from montreal concert so you know they've they made more than 5000 concerts over the years they released about 400 something lps there was also cd dvd blu-ray and so on and they they have this collection united in a room called the library and it's open five pm to five a.m and you can go and ask oh can i listen to bill evans in 68 yes you can and uh and somebody somebody who works there will operate the turntable absolutely so kerry had the very difficult task to educate some people that never saw a turntable on how to use it was kind of a scary adventure and did it work yeah do they know they were young people um do they like it they like it um somewhere trepidatious but others just dived right in because it's it's the cool thing and you show them how to clean the stylus to everyone you gotta do that man like so many p i go to people's homes and they go it's not sounding as good as it sounded when you first put it in for me and then i take a little microscope and put it on the stylus and you don't even see the stylus anymore it's like encrusted i've seen some of your articles you know why because they take the record out like this with their fingertips and then the grease gets on the outside of the record and then the stylus hits the grease and then the dirt attracts to the stylus with the grease and then the heat bakes it on we did talk about that uh and and we'll go over routinely and clean the stylus and check on the turntable make sure everything's running right i'm very fastidious about that yeah okay we have a second turntable yeah in the place called the vinyl bar and it's mended by fred father which is uh you want to say a few words are you well go ahead man fred is a he's a journalist he is a music lover he has a huge record collection not as big as yours but he gathered with a friend they had like 35 000 records they made a 3 000 ideal collection that they like of any style and it's a vinyl bar a bit like in japan you know so the people can come and say oh can i use them to wrap or can i send to chat and they will say yeah you have this there and there we also have a turntable and it's crazy because it's a house they built just for the festival for two weeks so the floor is like very very flexible so you can see the spring working very well uh and you'll get to see that later on yeah great okay now what else is in what else have you got in this system you want to run me through the whole system yeah so the prototype of the future hd phone that we'll release later this year so we've been working on that project almost four years uh you want really now the step up transformer that's in there is that you wind that yourself or you have a wound for you we have a winding facility that you'll see later on in the visit this is part really of the the strength of niagara this is a legacy from the the heads and also doing cards and uh transformers power transformer we used to do we do all the audio transformers yeah that's good you will see on the menu 20 you can access to the transformer if you want a db 20 or 26 db so with the cartridge we have a 4 ohm and a 6 ohm the 4 ohm will sounds better with the matching impedance this is your own cartridge yes it's brand new will be released at the fall use the exam the same material than the platter again we try many solutions sometimes it was so analytical so bright sometimes it was kind of dull so we add yes we will try the exam and everything happen and also we did work a lot on the motor so we have nine hertz resonance and uh the tracking is exceptional you can have all the test disks and have no issue on the beginning middle or at the end of the lp the tracking is really uh perfect you have no sense of distortion there's a main intake anticipating on the tone arms here that you can adjust you just need to put a little so what is the is the cantilever of boron cantilever or what is it it is a saphir zephyr yes it's it's weird because we really choose everything by ear yeah so i'm sure you can work with other design on that design it was more let's say you listen to an orchestra the purity of all the string and the the flute and everything was more beautiful more depth with rock music he was more dynamic there's no sense of metal in the sound and the stylus profile is this i'm not i'm not sure of the name but it's pretty kind of standard for iron cartridge but i don't know the aurora or namiki is a tube check and come back yes come back to you about this yes but also we make sure to don't lose the energy so you have the silver coil of the cartridge that have only a few turn because it's 4 ohm and after that you go directly to a very big silver cable directly at the motor without any you will see at the rnd a picture of it so you don't lose energy and it's the same thing with the cable inside the torn arms we did many tests and pure occ silver give us the energy transparency that we don't lose the signal so yeah excellent so we have the hd preamp that is a very big success for negra when you use the volume it's a transformer that you change but to be able to don't air anything in the speaker you have at the same time a transistor preamp just when you touch it and you go back to the transformer with tube when you don't touch it you can also change uh let's say you want to have different uh db from one channel to the other you can change it or go back normal so this is there's many advantage of this we have balance output by transformer we have the volume by the same transformer and so you have just one tube per channel with the volume transformer so the cl path is only few parts but when you see inside it's full of parts because of high voltage power supply a lot of decoupling big capacitor but the the it's really high-end uh very small circuit the advantage of the transformer is that left and right are pure strictly identical you can never do that with resistors or with potentiometers the all the gear is uh it's the first hd system like like in munich was the first time we have the full hd so hd funnel hd tacx converter hd preamp and the lower shelves are the power supply so every unit has a separate power supply in an isolated chassis for vibration control it's all super cap we have again for the turntable and the unit you have reserve inside the machine because what made nagra unique long time ago let's say you listen to a recording done on a negra 4s and it's a little machine and the sound is amazing it's one of the reason is because there was battery directly close to all the electronic so this is the same price the same idea on the total table we have a very big hd supercar power supply but inside the tongue table we also have a lot of reserve of super cap just beside the motor and when you do the test with and without it's really night and day you feel that it's really more depth more stable the speed is more luck so this is one of thing that might not do let's make it special the hd amp i have only six mosfet per channel but a very large transformer it's 1 1 600 va and again the circuit is very small so you have maybe you here in munich you have a very dynamic sound of 400 or 600 watt but with only six mosfet not 24 transistor or 48 transistor so when it's well matched with the speaker it's amp that can drive it was built to drive any load and i think it might be the only one in the world that can drive very difficult speaker and having so little parts like a very short circuit well the speaker that you use the munich goes down to one ohm at certain parts of the frequency range and most of it's at two two to four ohms max and so and you're in a big room and it filled the room and the sound was incredible in that room everybody came out of that room like they can't see my face but yes people were dazed and also for rock music it was very loud like to pressurize a 100 feet room by 60 by far yeah the ac dc sent some people out of the room oh no they went running for diana crawl in another room and i'm okay with that that's fine but the one that was excited was really exciting let me show you the inside of the this is the hd preamp do you want some right all right yes yes so this is the transformer that will change the volume so you have a lot of relay to select the right type of the volume and this is the circuit this is the audio circuit the rest is high voltage power supply reserve and you have an external power supply so this is a very high end tube to have very low impedance the the ampulence will be about one ohm at the output so you can drive long interconnect or drive any other brand of amp or no problem this is also prototype normally all the boards are gold this is a product so yeah this is a prototype we were doing some tests so the the gold what you see is a gold layer they use for uh grounding so all the small squares it's like a ground protection so normally all our pcbs are like that be careful with the small steps [Applause] it's the noisy factory floor that's where we do the parties so this is the r d we don't always film here i guess scary explain you why because of the security business you don't want me you don't know you can and and eventually uh maybe we can review it if we see anything we shouldn't of course normally we kind of hide the things we should not show uh let me guide you so gentlemen make a trainer hello production hi leonard stefan tiago nicola and the boss is here terry how you doing terry nice to meet you nice to meet you thanks maybe you met each other in munich briefly briefly yeah that was that's just an insane place to meet anybody you know yeah this isn't this is much here um so uh i was working on a new uh implant board and i would just show you a bit what i'm doing now um here you you can see the schematics this is where you you choose and you you put all the components you want on the board and then you have to connect them together so with the wires and from that you come to a real board here where you have to um to arrange the components physically where you you want to to be on the on the board so when you arrange these you can you can like click on one of these parts and move it around yes exactly so yeah it's a lot easier now than it was in the old days right yeah and you can see the connection that i draw on the schematics keeps connecting the the components together here now the left channel sound sounds less good than the right channel and um now i i have to to wire this with real copper so i will put some copper layers here it's already drawn so i'll just show you the results now this is everything is um is drawn by hands there is no automatic process though so that's kind of yeah knowledge and what is this what is this going to be this will be an amplifier board and yeah we we pay a lot attention of how the current flows on the copper and we have some tools which helps seeing that i will show you a result i just done here this is how the current flows from the power supply is coming here how it goes through the diodes then to a power mosfets and it goes through here to a connector going next to the to the loudspeaker so how long does it take to go from an idea to a layout to producing boards to putting something together and then releasing a product how is that yours depending on the products it could be from one month to six months or years depending on the complexity of the product yeah and from that i can see and adjust some something to get the better quality and when everything is is correct on the computer we have to build a prototype and then we do some other measurements and listening as well and we have to validate all this theory and if something goes wrong by listening or on the measurements we come back to the computer make some modifications so is your first version on a breadboard all hand wired this one is the first one yeah yeah it's currently under um building we have to assemble it assemble it soon okay thank you thank you hi hi there hello hello here what's going on here yeah we here we we designed this this board in front of for the front panel it's handle all the the input of the of the device so the goal is to be produced of any kind of monkey test of the user so this is the preamp that's that's the phone's tape that we had in the final stage and one of the most important thing of this device is that this keyboard which is digital is completely separated electrically from the behind which is 100 analogy so we isolate it with opto israel between them so the goal is to to make it work and to have a really good feeling with the phone parliament this kind of uh feeling and touch which now the board the boards are stuffed uh elsewhere for you we don't do the board the it's chemical to do the boards and the populating the board you need huge machines yeah we don't have we yeah we put the very special condenser that are custom made for us that anyway you can't put by mission but the small parts they are by machines yeah actually the pcb is yeah it's built somewhere else but uh everything all the design is done here and some of this is surface mount or no surface mattress few few of them especially maybe in the control panel you have more of them which is fine i'm not i'm not i have no you know prejudice against surface about technology it's like people have these ridiculous ideas about things well libra was the first brand to use surface made component in the sixth i 70s early 70s right in the sn to make it more miniature so this is something we know very well how to handle and once it would have charged you can see the the the settings you can control either by the front panel or by the remote are very extensive because we really wanted the customer to find the right match for his cartridge or also for the curves without having to open things up and enhance well yeah and be able to change your charge on on your sofa yeah and be able to compare the sound into on your sofa and change charge which is not the case for a lot of products so that's a really important thing it takes it looks simple to do it but it takes some months oh yeah yeah yeah yeah sure it's programming software and making it and making sure it's reliable i mean exactly that's point make it reliable it's take time to make things available and talk about the optical yeah right before that's uh so the low noise is the main feature of the other device to have a very low noise from the digital controller that control all the function and the full tube analog circuit so you need to have separate power supply and it's optical so there's no ground link between not link at all nothing electrically completely different so that's one of the most important because here we talk about mic under microvolts yeah so it's really a big big dynamic big and so you have to be careful about what this phone panel can generate in in terms of noise etc so how long was it to develop this product when you started it and when it's finally finished was years and then four years but okay it's not we have also other projects so it's never full time on april right we started four years ago you can because it's only phonograph it's not important [Laughter] and uh it's a product it's we don't always have the right treatment before the product is finished but in this case we have oh that's nice so you can change all the settings there i'll just take that as a souvenir you can it's okay that's nice we and that's a finished product so it's not that light and yeah it's light and classy very nice looks good so we didn't want to have more comfort at the cost of sound so the quality of the song was the first concern and control is just additional which is uh i think a nice feature so what what is going on here is my job two programs is exactly it's good and we make a lot of tests right now to make it better this is not been released yet this product no it will when do you think or on the end of the year the first few days so it could be a christmas present maybe or something you should put down the list and and you want to make sure that when it gets when someone gets it as a christmas present and they hook it up that all these things light up the right way and nothing exactly and i and if you see something let me know and what happens if something goes wrong do they do they fire you or do you get to stay here it depends but usually we correct as soon as possible as a bug because it can happen but i make it really important for me to make really this without any bugs i know yeah anything that's the by challenge and the big challenge even in the industry it's always a challenge to not have any bugs even if you do what i like to to do the the monkey test you know you do that you do that you off you pour on you you want to treat it like like the customer does exactly use the product abuse all the time and this you bring in your kid you bring the young people in here yeah and it must not freeze or anything that's what i like actually is something you you rely of on i like looking at this it's the same as this so are you the mechanical guy i'm uh the multi-uh guy i can do mechanics electronic software both yeah yeah and so you you worked on this turntable yep and how long have you been working on this turntable three years three years yeah yeah what took you so long we wanted to do the best you want to be good okay with that that's good and you were also involved in the cartridge design yes i'm uh doing the design of the the full cartridge and what stylus profile is attached to that satellite it's a subtitle sapphire cantilever and what's the stylist you know i hope you know guys are special it's nice that you can do that you can see everything inside this is the the cable i told you about that is attached to the cable so you don't lose energy as soon as possible and this is all done in-house this cartridge is completely your your design no we we do the design but we make it build uh all the mechanical parts are not machined inside right but for you but your your your design your can you show the exam part exam here is really used uh almost like in the nasa pro as some kind of socket isolation circuit this is it so it's the the interface with the tone arm and the magnet here so here we go i removed the this is a kind of a super magnesium part magnesium yeah all the the magnet is fixed on the exium part don't show too many things [Laughter] it's okay you can you can block them out in the editing process that's a big task to take on is to design a cartridge from yeah i don't like to use the word scratch around cartridges so i won't use the word scratch but to design it from the ground up yeah it is for a very long time the resonance was from eight to about 16 hertz and we cannot know how to do to really reach it and it was a bit by mistake that we found how to do it to have lower resonance because you know a lot of people would just say well there's a lot of cartridge makers out there we'll just get one to take one of theirs and put our name on it but you didn't do that we we did like many things about some uh i don't want to name brand but you know you like the timber of that one i like the resolution of that one but the main problem is it was not much for the tone arms it was not much for the funnel so it's a complete solution from the cartridge to the speaker so everything is matched the impedance is matched the gain is matched so you don't need to mess around with maybe i should do that or so we try many other reference cartridge and this one was more studio sound it really sounds more master tape so it's a bit less i5 it's kind of more the real thing for us but okay we want to show you the difference between the exam and the aluminium you can do the demo so this is the aluminium part which is kind of light lightweight if you want to take it and if you if you ting this does it yeah it's really a resonance this is an exium part and this is made out of your special material from outer space yeah okay and oh big difference yeah yeah and we we tried a lot of different materials there before we did the exam also try different options and also like it's a bit it's always the same philosophy we have it's theoretical work and then it's uh usually simulation computer simulation test measurements and then listening and then if we're not happy we come back and we do it as many times as needed and i think in the case like the cartridge it's the 15th version we are doing so why it took time also because it's every time a few weeks to do it and we really want the end result to be accessed by listening even if eventually we don't expect this material to be the right because measuring is a bit less good but hearing is what we are here it's a tuned system that's a people don't change system you have to remember it's always a tuned system so you can't put in the numbers and be done and say oh it's totally damp so it's going to be good because exactly yeah and maybe we can just show you because we talk about the super cap in the turntable and uh if we show you what's underneath here that people don't get to see unfortunately but this is a super cat model so it's packed with super caps the onions they're on the inside and so the energy is really extremely close to the motors to where we need it we don't need a huge energy of course but still it's here it's available and the bearing that's in there is you design have and made for you by a super machining place yeah the bearing yeah absolutely so we we have uh different partners too we used to do every everything in house in the days of the analog recorders yeah we really just bought raw material we even do the screws at that time uh of course today it's a bit different yeah we try to insert as much as we can but uh some people are really specialized and do absolutely good job of course and we're not using them you hear that from consumers oh they don't make it all the same you mean ferrari buys tires from pirelli or wherever they get them from why don't they make their own tires well yeah they do it right exactly i say thank you [Music] okay so this is uh the assembling and lab good morning good afternoon mario hi hello mario nice to meet you nice to meet you uh so what what you will see and it's not arranging a chronology of building the products because we extend here and there uh so you you see different parts that are not really uh the product is not built like that but anyway here we do it's called the lab so the lab is where we do a lot of testing and um maybe you want to say a few words about what we do is when the machine is assembled then we the machine comes to us to the electronic test and then we do the first power on then we put the power supplies and then we start doing all the tests to see if the machine is working fine then we have um generators analyzers oscilloscopes sure in order to follow a procedure that we we established uh to see if everything is working so this is actually a finished product that once it passes all the tests it gets boxed up and sent out not yet not yet this is the first power on okay then after that there is what we call the burning test burning test after the burning test we do the the final test which is uh really each machine has the procedure with the different measurements for each machine and then the final test is the subjective or the listening test oh yeah actually each piece gets listed yes yes we have a [Music] room which is built to listen not really like the client but to to detect the the the the problems right and that's and then goes to the to the client yeah how long does it take to go from the first time you tested the burning the listen again and then listening test to packings it worked the whole test i would say three four years four years days oh yes not really not really the the the testing it's just the whole process because here i will say half an hour one hour depends on the machine then the burning test could be two days yeah power on power of music and everything the final test would be half an hour and the listening test would be also half an hour or an hour that depends on the have you brought any bad shocks doing this work sometimes luckily small enough you can't really get your fingers in there and do well here we have 200 volts then it's not really something that you don't want you don't want to touch that i built this one i built a color tv kit once it was a color tv kit yeah and it all vacuum tubes and all point-to-point wiring and then when it was done you had to do all the alignment and they tell you for one hand behind your back and one hand in there to do don't touch two things yes luckily i didn't get shocked because you could have gotten killed yeah and we when we have problems that's the thing we should be really careful because actually when we power off if everything goes fine this 200 volts goes down very quickly but if you have a problem and you think that is discharged and maybe not because the problem is just there yes then it it gets uh it stays and that's uh we had some bad experience with that yeah so this is a the tube deck and it's really popular for legra you you get volume for the headphone you get also very variable volume for the output but you can put on fix and at the preamp like the hd preamp or the classic preamp right so it's a very good dac it's two with uh also a transformer that isolate the digital part to the analog point it's pretty unique it's a converter digital this is the analog part this is the digital part this is the analog part input and the output which is analog okay thank you and continue good luck yes so because the production is never really you don't always have all the parts to do everything we have a lot of resting place for half assembled hot finished products so are you having the supply chain issues that everybody else in the world is having well yeah you see uh macho is in charge of production and he can uh he's smiling so it can't be that bad but it's a fake smile so you are you're having the usual production supply chain issues getting parts of course we have so we need to get them before the crisis up here but now we have enough stock to do what we can but in the future we will need to find an alternative to what we have now yeah so do you use a lot of microchips in your product and and that's a that's a big stumbling block right now electronic parts are the difficult ones yeah mechanical are not so difficult because the raw material is not troubling us today but electronic as a lot of companies using them are looking maybe alternative so yeah for now we are not but we will need to and then the problem is you don't want to stock too much because that's a that's a drain on on your whole financial situation when you're sitting there with all this stuff but you don't want too little because then you end up not having products to complete so it's a fine line yeah yeah and who makes those determinations is that you do that no matter and our ceo would scratch the head and they're the financial director as well yeah and we had situation where we can't build enough for the demand so you want to stock more but then if the demand slows on you it's like any company it's kind of a challenge it's a small volume production but anyhow we have the problem of not being too big when we buy components that's why we're happy that we use a lot of tube technology uh although we have microprocessor as well but some of it could be considered like vintage so it's resistor condenser parts that you can still find yeah but it's kind of a ch it's kind of the challenge actually right now yeah and it's a skill that wasn't necessary just a few years ago when whatever you needed you could get now all of a sudden it's well i think matcha before that was purchasing manager and it's a challenge because we do a lot of custom-made condenser uh we do some in us i japan's or in france and so you always have to find the right partner to do the right job there are a lot also of fake components so something you're familiar with so you have to be careful where you buy components from so it was already kind of a challenge but it get it got much more difficult right now yeah yeah okay thank you you're keep smiling so we are back in the part that we call assembling uh so if you if you don't mind uh turn it off no you can uh shoot the arms or their hands if you want uh not the face if you don't mind no faces okay sure okay so fabian has been here i guess with like feminists 42 years in the company so she worked with stefan kudelski back in the days but did she ever think she'd be working on a tonearm that's good so it was something he considered doing at the time now is that silver wire that you have in there or yeah it's um it's made custom made by crystal cabinet yes hi gabby this carbon fiber arm is sourced from some place in switzerland or no it it's made by andre terry who's been uh working on the design with us but it's it's one we own the design of and uh right now it's still made canada for the for the wind so it's important to know that it's wood inside and there's many layer of carbon fiber by end so it's really like an italian bicycle yeah if you go from the inside there's a carbon tube on the inside then there is a wood part and then on the wood part it shapes the the latest carbon part and it's all in one part to the head shell it's all in one yeah and again it was uh really interesting by listening this one i have 10 inch and a half and because when the purchaser saw the price of my meter was kind of scared the toothpick if you visit a watch company you will see they use that extensively and crazy glue that's acrylics we we call it crazy glue when i use it whatever it is i'm trying to glue doesn't get glued with my fingers stick together so at the end it's a it's a mono black tone arms so the rigidity is very very high and the resonance is very very low so you get a bit more resolution and less coloration that's that's the idea and then we could do this that's the fun part yeah that's the fun there are never men doing this particular job any place really this is this is a job for a woman it is just is i should get one of those tools i need one of those tools really badly huh it's amazing see she's following the instructions that's what men don't do they don't follow the instructions come on foreign so no faces so same for him just the hands just hands okay so this is back to the lab part uh where we do the measurement the alignments and uh this is a classic amp it's the amplifier of the classic line so mosfet amplifier like the hdm we have upstairs so we have a typical points to check this place so this is a new way going through its run yeah this one came from from a checkup maybe somebody wants to call a second hand or a dealer gaming it's a lot of work done because it's it's actually even almost as much as a new one and this bench that we have here was built by nago same the power supply that you you see there the dc power supply they were designed by stephan kudalski you know as a student he built an oscilloscope he wanted to have the best tools and often we wanted to make him the tools he even designed the air conditioning system in the factory so that our colleague who takes care of this part he's not here in this afternoon but he left his job so we could see it this is the first power it's all in there it's the first power on for the eight big amplifiers uh so when you power such a huge bank of capacitors you have some you can take some kind of precautions so it's a bit like a rescue sitting room room in the hospital we have a lot of different points to test before we can make sure everything's good set the bias oh yeah you can see the the condenser we're using there eight uh very large uh condenser for that amp so very good good reserve so when we shut it down it takes a light bulb and it's on for several minutes to empty the condensers so that's why uh mario was saying uh first bar on maybe 30 minutes for a simpler product maybe one hour for more complex products like this one this is the audio board so there's nothing else about ozu if you go in and out from this so it's pretty transparent and natural and the output is on the other side the classic end is only two mosfet per channel and it's mounted on a solid aluminium block so no resonance so this is a brand new amp going through its yeah test yeah so the hdf is one one that takes a lot of time um and also because of the power the heat you have to make some adjustments so it takes a bit longer to do those products and the other challenge is it's kind of big and heavy for us so you need special tools so you don't have to lift it how much does this weight you know yeah it's about uh 65 kilos or 150 pounds the first 30 watt is in class a after that you go in a b but most of the speaker like the xvix or whatever you don't really need to rewat you need it only when you have very big dynamic in the music so most of the listening is classy yeah so this is if i was making this turntable i'd want to be on camera too to tell you the truth so this is the the typical sandwich thing sort of very thick aluminium wet finally so the end result is very very damp so gotta get one yeah maybe so you see for us that we're used to doing manager recorders it was kind of a learning curve to to get to do those uh extremely large products sure so we had to build uh special tools and adapt our working techniques the control panel of the turntable so it's kind of a solid block of aluminum that is put together so very nice this one the length of the length of the tone arms was also select for sound but also we really want to have the tone arms on the deck not outside of the deck with a palette you know kind of so you have the vk when you turn like this you go up and down so you can find soon very quickly and by very little if you want and this is a iron plastic because we don't want to have metal on metal so there's uh we listen to every possibility and you show underneath what's under the usb and it can carry this this part is very heavy yes and you have the anti-skating screw well it's not there yet oh yeah okay [Music] so it's a magnetic repulsion kind of yes yes so this this is the tower [Music] so this will floating with the sub chassis this is all power supply from the classic line very big upgrade if you own a regular mega 12 volt dc like the tll the dps the it's a super cap when you compare with sound quality it's much more depth this is where we we set the speed of the drive part so we make sure it works properly and we memorize the right speeds this is many parts from the first prototype we did not keep the the cable the you know all the material did change right it's a really old prototype [Music] so now he's putting the posts on michael if you want to see maybe uh when we populate the boards what is this for this is an amplifier board the classic amp board and so the cms are already populated and we do all the ones that go through so those are relays for instance so that that is done by hand yeah the burning part yeah i mean we have different burning space this one is for digital so this one is for preamps we have one for the amplifiers so it's the beginning of the month so a lot of them have been shipped so we're just starting now new batches so we play music here and we load the amplifiers uh we connect everything so that it's almost like a speaker was connected and we can do that either at the swiss voltage is 230 volts but when we ship unit for the us we do them at us voltage we do japanese voltage uk voltage and we do all the tests at the final destination voltage as well so the spec that you can see on our document is your heart and at your your voltage and this is the small place where we burn the tubes also so that is two days of um so you see the difference the this one is not a prototype it's a final product so it's the gold board and uh compared to the listening room prototype the the puff here it's really like to know where the customer want the volume it's nothing to do with the sound it's really important to know that it's only the transformer but it is used to know where you want the volume hello hello so the because of our history and the 70 years of manufacturing we we handle more than 30 000 different parts which is too much but some parts we don't even really know what they were used for companies and this is another thing that many consumers don't appreciate that when you have a company that runs for this long you have to have parts for every product that you make so that consumers when they buy something they know that it's supported by the company that built it um you know our philosophy is to provide at least 10 years after we sold the last one but some products we still maintain that are from the set from 57 the niagara three yeah the hd preamp is lower than 150 db for the noise floor so every machine is test with audio precision so this is the test of that machine for sure if you compare to the competition normally the line will be about air or air it will be not that low so we work here for five years on this so you reach 160 db and it's tube one of the reason it is that the gain is negative so you cannot reach if you have 20 db of gain of line stage but the gain is negative so most of the time you gain dynamic so it's the transformer make it that you don't choke the signal so when the signal come in the preamp you don't lose that signal and because of the transformer usually you choke all the signal with the putt like a 100 000 right home pot that you turn down so you lose 20 or 4 or 40 db of signal to noise so the design was really different so in here this is the small test room we use to check every single unit that we build and ship it's not designed to here uh for pleasure or to design products but we have different speakers we have speakers we can lower without too much damages so like to exchange the tweeter 12 times and in here we have all the different sources we have analog we have digital and we can a b with regular product from our production that we keep so we would do a batch of 20 units come here plug everything check the remote all the inhale out check if everything works and if there is a problem that hasn't been detected by all the measurements there's a last chance that you can still hear it and there's also a visual inspection and then we go to the packing so after all of this you must have a very low return rate yeah we do uh the only problem in between is the shipping companies that are here to destroy our work yes uh but we have uh increased the package uh damping over the years yeah yes do you have to do drop tests yeah absolutely we do that it's like one meter on all we do it on all the parts of the box so we do it six times yeah yeah we do that and it it's it's costly when you do that like for a turntable or four oh but you have to you have to you have to you want the customer to do the test for you no this is the quality that is reject uh if you find the the the diff how do you say that yeah defect yes can i find the defect i don't know can people at home find the defense well yellow means uh a question mark maybe it's not big enough is it like the the bevel there is a little bit off or possibly red would mean it's uh defect with context so you can see there's some kind of line here that is a bit brighter like it's not a scratch it's the chamfron we call it the part that is angled is uh it's a bit too pronounced you can feel it with your finger you can see it here it's too too wide oh that's who does that visual inspection well a gentleman that unfortunately is not here today and uh so everybody can put a yellow one or a red one but he's the only one that can override the yellow and say well this is okay it won't cause a problem yeah or eventually call one of the salesperson ready it means it's disqualified there's no discussion is there any fixing of that or it has to just be scrapped well uh sometimes you can actually treat the part remove all the silk screen and re re-brush it re-analyze it reseal screen re-annotate it but it's really if there's like a whole batch where uh i don't know there's a blur on the the ink or yes if it's a scratch it's very difficult to yeah what's difficult is actually to say that it's something you don't accept or something you accept and it's a very difficult dialogue with the manufacturers if we don't do it in-house yeah um and then you get back there that's nothing wrong with that that's fine it was either in transport or you scratch it when you unpack it that's why we also do a lot of uh cnc here as well yeah yeah it's all new turntable for customers so this is really exciting for negra because you work for many years there's a lot of partner at dealer but this is really more for the customer and our colleague from the warehouse wanted a paper free handling of the stock so it's recycled it's on plastic so we can write the different settings so we don't throw paper every time so these are all turntables ready to go yeah is this your first shipment of turntables no but for customers so six nine ten eleven two oh well no that's one turntable oh boxes okay how naive of me this is not the turntable this is the base of every hd product the hd funnel the hd preamp so it's again it's to have low resonance and inside the sabaton so you have isolation from the base to the product that kind of have a suspension again when you test the sound of this over without or over spike or anything you get the base is not no longer in the speaker it's kind of you have a really a big sound stage in the bass so it was a really big improvement okay can you lift it yeah see it's really damp yep yep so this goes directly to a dealer first yeah well yeah through a distributor or a dealer and then he will take it to the customer and unbox everything and set it up uh well for the anniversary that's part of the special project we will send somebody over yeah from the factory or rene will go from quebec to do the same yeah and if we don't do the seller we can just do like a follow-up after a few days or weeks to make sure everything is properly done and the line and uh because that's critical to getting it sound good is that it goes that far and it's also very subtle changes as you know so if you don't do it exactly as it should be maybe you miss a bit maybe you don't realize that you miss it but you missed something yeah the thing is with the magna cartridge it will be possible to ship the table ready to play like it will you have to do some uh assembly uh it's about three three step you don't send it with the cartridge attached to the headshot you do okay the cartridge is available right you could if you want it yeah then it could come yeah and you just so the i think this is the main thing it will sounds like it should out of the box yeah so that will still come to say because that's part of the anniversary and part of the anniversary deal is that you have a factory tour so it's part of the special immediate edition so this is your loading dock well yeah it's really because the building was like that we we are not big enough that we have so many trucks but it's comfortable yeah and for the suppliers also offer aluminium or the challenge is the to deal with the in and out and what stays and you need a lot of volume for that yeah and the more volume you have the more comfortable it is and otherwise you have like traffic jams there's an hour where you have stock and this is a lot of this is ready to go right yeah all those uh nicely packaged and filmed they're waiting for the truck to demo how many countries do you ship products to about 35 35 and does any of this stuff end up getting opened up and taken apart by customers to see what's inside sometimes are even destroyed by the custom it also happens the problem is that sometimes they do it carefully but they don't properly repackage the foam or yeah of course okay so this is part of a new extension that we did a couple couple of years ago when we decided to resource part of the cnc machine one of the reasons was to expand the production capacity the other one was the quality issues that we had this is a big place ah the secret sauce section this is about that place the white winding facility so we were asking about that earlier on yeah and we are doing funnel stage transformers today so oh you can see how it's done so it involves a lot of manual operation so it's a very precise job where you have just one chance to do it right so here we are inserting the isolation and there's a counter back there so you know exactly how many wines you got absolutely okay foreign don't use the word scratch around anything oh yeah from zero okay so it starts with the core so it's up with a special component so it's very special material it's not off the shelf so it's 0.40 so the first thing you do is to take enough normal how long does it take to train someone to do this um some years because they are easy transformer when it's like in and out and it's a ternary secondly yeah and they are much complex like the one with the hd prior it takes five hours to build [Music] so now the right length of cable is in this big ring and so we can do the first area so first it's pre-loaded onto that big ring the correct amount the correct lens and the computer of the machine [Music] don't try that at home and you can see that it's up to 360 degree the spreading is perfect yep but even though you use a machine there is a lot of hand operation so it takes a lot of time a lot of skills to do it right now and you only know when it's finished if it's good or not is that by measuring it oh this is the tricky part to insert your sleeves with the right color code at home is [Music] so imagine when you have 14 different writings to you've got a lot do machines here yeah because they are preset for certain types of transformers so we save a lot of time for setup time it takes several hours to set up a machine like that the um with the volume so the transformer need to do five hertz to 200 000 hertz without any phase shift without any lust so it's really really difficult to do and the one of the hd funnel it's a cabal input transformer they need to have the same kind of spec so you don't hear the kind of weird sound of a transformer when the the transformer don't reach over 60 000 hertz you really change the sound so those transformers are really flat hey what up beautiful i'll just take that as a survey of my visitors chills at the end of the day so all that beauty gets hidden it is it is this is assembler of uh the kind of things we do here uh from the tiniest transformers of course it's it's a very interesting thing to do that in-house because when you design a product and you need a certain coil or something you don't have to take something that has a defined spec you can do it like you want yeah and those are power transformer output transformer of the 300b amplifiers that were also made in-house uh including multi-wire so they were done entirely by hand so it takes a half a day to build a drawer like that it's a very difficult job very hard very humid or very very dry very cold minus so you can test we can test the units in there especially field recorders you want to make sure they work in any condition and so we use this kind of uh make sure it works like a jungle environment exactly we use them sometimes for hi-fi also when we want to try some specific things okay so this is the cnc part where we we do the machining of the aluminium plates we receive the aluminium in large face you can take this so that it cuts out the external part about 40 pounds [Music] so the machine will know we'll check where is the border so that it's not critical to align them there's a vacuum system that will suck the plates so you don't have to use external system to hold it um [Music] so what wow gerardo is doing right now is to prepare the unit depending on the place we want to do because of the different thickness you need different tools so it's preparing the tools and so this one is uh to do raw work this one will do fine details so different stages different tools and the unit can have a certain number of tools but you need to change them by hand from one batch to the other [Music] the unit is doing this to remove the hedgehog for the front panel [Music] five five to six that hours not this is the suction unit that will uh so do so [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] good [Music] so [Music] this is the different stages that that we do so this is the raw material this is a protection layer when we do the machining and then after machining you see it has this kind of lines here so we have to brush it and brushing is something we do once it's still a big plate and this part is done by hand with a sandblaster to do the logo and at the end of the day you have this and this is before anodizing and after advertising it comes to that yeah it's a lot to do and also the machining is it's a process but then all the rest is actually very tricky and costly to do and any stage if you drew scratch if you drop it if the anodizing is not done right the color will change because it's natural aluminium but it could be more silver could be more brown and we want the provision to be consistent from one part to the other and we have our own sending brushing machine so you can see the we we cut out part of the big beef plate and we we do a first brush then we'll do machining and then we'll come back to the final brush we got a b blaster over there well yeah this is uh the sunglassing machine we use to do the logo so it's kind of uh so you you inject sand like for water but it's a sand very very fine sense and it's like drawing you can do a lot of things we used to do that also for conductivity after anodizing so once it's anodized the aluminium is no more conductive so you need to make small holes so that the whole box is conductive to protect from the interferences today it's done by laser but so we use that just for the logo you're gonna throw me off the loading dock that's what's gonna happen it's gonna be really special okay welcome baby careful with this step tapes yeah so this is where we keep the our archives we are lucky to be a partner of the clone knobs foundation so we also uh sometimes happen to have some marquettes from the festival it's very hard to open whoa who plays drums oh did not know that so you know we do recording equipment as well and we wanted a place to to play music to record music to try new equipments so what machine is this this is the nara ta it's the only like studio inaugural all the other ones were portable and it was used extensively for transfer it's a dual it has two captains so the tape is very smoothly carried around so when they have very special archives or black box tape from aircraft they were happy to have this kind of very smooth transport sure what year was this from early 80s and here we have also um and this is a master tape from leonard cohen from 1976 i guess from the jazz festival just a bit of uh before you go to the concert yeah and this is a niagara d recorder so it's a digital narration on tape but it's digital and it's from the early 90s and it's the first ever high resolution recorder uh made it's a 9624 so in the early 90 was pretty advanced yeah and it was used a lot in classical music as a location recorder a lot of on film sets as well like an english patient was recorded and they win [Music] for sound quality the rest of the line here is the classic line so that's in the other room you have the hd right here we have the classic with so my father started with a prototype of a niagara one i found it at home you know i make some work for cleaning organizing the archive and there it was yes i found this in it was in k1 in his office and so here you have nagya one finished and after the niagara two which is an amelioration of the niagara one and in 1957 58 you have niagara free here is a prototype you have no ceregraphy no writing on it yep i found it in the k-1 oh yes and here venagra free which was the wow for the industry yeah and at this time the company started to skyrocket because it changed the way in which you make the radio yes i was involved in film sound when this was being used and here you have a split for the cinema with the magura 4s and here vanagra 4s allowed us to win oscars it was a great moment for my father oh sure yes especially in 1978 we went the wall family to us to only my brother could assist to the ceremony but it was a great moment for my father and here you have more journalist devices full track mono yes in it was a design in you have all the elements if you need to fix it the modulo met can use as a voltmet and he have a niagara es which was also a simplified item and during weekend after when my father already left you have rs c which is an interesting in uh device because it's already a solid-state flash drive yes here you have the naguar d which is also an interesting one it is the last real device and the first digital [Music] so you have a successor number five and vernacular c x and the niagara seven all these devices are full digital so my father also tried with an agua tea it was to make a studio high-end recorder for a studio and here we have also some interesting devices as he was noticing that the audio recorder were not selling a lot more um in decreasing when increasing he started to try different uh devices here it's a night view device so you can see in the night totally different different yes but a lot of companies face that yes as as it was a trail yeah here it was an agra fax it's uh it is a device which allowed us to get the meteor uh the meteor maps to uh make weather weather forecasting especially for boats and what is that niagara t rvr iraq mounted a living record yes it was more military device and this one was also interesting because it was a joint venture with ampex to make a small video recorder one person so it allowed us to learn the video video component that it allowed the company after to go in the pay tv system for information the vpf4 was like a cupboard so he reduced the size from i think a hundred kilo to five kilos yeah and here we have all what is for the spy service secret i love that yes the sn which was very popular you you can get stereo confessions under stress that's good good but it was at first the n and the s the n was a better quality and the s will last longer here you have a system for listening to the [Music] sn because this device has no loudspeaker and here you have a train for cassette i also found this prototype at home and here the gbr which are which was the successor of sn and here you have a device where you can listen to what is recorded on vergie bear and after we have cba which was the successor now we still are in this market but in a very discrete way so we don't show what we are doing oh boy yes [Music] [Music] you

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Length: 101min 19sec (6079 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 23 2022