picture of me

been fixing Quads for a long time, contact me

SDS Labs is the name which I call my house and my designs when I put on my audio design hat. At this point SDS Labs is barely a commercial company, it's mostly a hobby for me. I do all my audio work under the name SDS Labs for two reasons, first because of the EGO thing, and secondly someday I may turn this silliness into more of a commercial company. But for now, I am doing this stuff because I like it, and I'm more that willing to share my designs with the world for non-commercial uses.

I currently live in the upper valley of New Hampshire and work for Creare doing all sorts of science and engineering tasks. I live here with my wife Hallie and a pair of Pembroke Corgis.

At this point, I have three basic forks to my audio work. The first and most quirky is refurbishing and assisting in keeping alive the original Quad Electrostatic Loudspeakers (Quad ESL) as well as the ESL-63 and newer versions. These loudspeakers are in many ways still state-of-the-art even more than 45 years later. I provide component rebuilds including power supplies and panels, as well as complete rebuilds of the speakers. The second fork of my audio work is scratch built components including several DAC models, a headphone amplifier, and a tube based pre-amp which I will be finishing shortly. The third fork of my audio work is refurbishing classic vacuum tube audio gear. The products I offer in support of this are a number circuit boards which rebuild the power supplies of various pieces of gear.

My design philosophy is: A high performance audio product should have as simple a signal path as possible. The design should be robust and should not push the individual components to the limit of their operating conditions (this results in components with long life spans). The components should be inexpensive. I use established electronics design principals and some creativity to design simple, high-performance audio equipment. Finally, I believe in sharing my designs. I feel that the audio community (especially the high-end community) is already too full of pseudo-science and bullshit smoke and mirrors. I am doing my part to reduce the mystery in audio and try to push the state-of-the-art at the same time. If you look back at the 50's and 60's then audio innovation was the greatest, it was also the time when ideas flowed the most freely between designers and hobbyists. It has been proven that this free exchange of ideas works well, the Open Source movement and Linux (and the other free unix variants) is a prime example of what openness collaboration can accomplish.