Company History
Our first shipments of the original BlueBerry began in March of 2003. Shortly thereafter we added the Peach, then Merlin, pCAT and finally Tercel phono preamplifier. We have also upgraded the BlueBerry design twice in that period. And, it remains the #1 seller in our lineup.
My first entry into the audio world was in 1974 when I started a small company called Paragon Audio. Our "somewhat famous" Paragon Model 12A preamplifier, received many rave reviews, and some of those units still surface from time to time on Ebay, where they are coveted for their stunning sound, and command a premium price. I sold that company to BSR/ADC and headed up an exciting lineup at ADC in the late '70s before coming back to California to get into the emerging micro-computer industry. After 20-some years of that, it was time to get back to those lovely tubes, and a business with a little more soul, and at a little more human scale. And so, JuicyMusic was born from a desire for an old-fashioned craft style business working directly with customers...and working directly with my own hands.
Ideals
There are as many reasons to be in the audio business as there are people who are in it. My own goals are simple: have fun doing the work, create products that others find pleasing, and make an honest living. To this end, I design what I like, what I think sounds good, and I do so with a stong prejudice for something I came to call "juicy" sound.
Audio is terribly hard to put into words, and so we tend to fall back on useful metaphors. In my case, the sound I was after was like the taste experience you get when you bite into a fresh apple, or grape - an explosion of juicy flavors that lets you know immediately you are not eating something artificial or man made. When I hear real music my ear has that same sensation of naturalness, liveness and explosive dynamics (no, I don't mean loudness). That lively sound I refer to as "juicy music," and hence the name of the company. It's the subconscious recognition of something real versus something artificial.
Because I design by listening to my own 'inner ear', I don't actually care what the current fads are in audiophile land. The lean sound, the phat sound, accurate, vintage, lush, the East Coast or West Coast sound - means nothing to me. There are no committees here, no review boards, and no bosses flying in from the "Home Office" to override my own individual judgment about what makes reproduced music sound well, musical.
We DO subscribe to audiophile sensibilities to the degree that we acknowledge the ultimate measuring instrument to be the human ear/brain interface, and not a spectrum analyzer. "Instrument inspired" gear is what you find at the Big Box stores from all the famous international brands. They use the same chips, the same cookbook designs, the same measurements standards, production facilities, and not surprisingly therefore, produce the same goods under a myriad of different hoods and badges. Let's face it, they don't have time to do anything otherwise. We listen carefully and allow the ear to be the final judge. We don't however, believe in voodoo or magic, and you won't catch us selling special rocks to place on top of your amplifiers. We also have no interest in roaming into the exclusivity or vulgarity markets with components priced like houses or mega-yachts.
Juicy Music....really
When it comes to the sound I tune the equipment to, I make special note of just three main properties:
Transparency
Clarity
Spaciousness
Transparency is the property analogous to looking through a pain of glass. A glass with a slight haze or fog on it makes colors on the other side dull and lifeless and reduces contrast between colors. This haze or fogging is one of the most common attributes of amplifiers. It reduces the range of color that instruments produce, and this loss of contrast is a dulling of the sound. Obviously when you hear live music, there is nothing between you and the music to create this dullness. With reproduced music, we have to be very careful about fogging up the view! everything you put in the signal chain has the potential to add fog or haze.
Clarity for our purposes relates primarily to the layers of sound remaining distinct and intelligible from one another. Simply put, if a gong and a bass drum are sounded together, there is a natural interaction of the waves which will occur in an acoustic space, and then there can be an UNnatural interaction (distortion) occuring in the electronic space of reproduction. We understand the sound of the former, and we subconsciously recoil when we hear the latter. One of the easiest experiments to get your ear tuned to clarity, is to play a conventional 3-way speaker and then switch to a single-driver speaker. Putting aside some tonal differences, and the difference in perhaps bass response, you will hear an immediate increase in clarity when you go to the single-driver speaker. This doesn't mean everyone would like a single-driver speaker, or that 3-ways are bad, it is just a useful tool for understanding clarity as an attribute of reproduced music. Electronics - like amplifiers - generally ruin clarity by having too much feedback in the circuits, which can produce a smudge, blur or smear effect on the signal. Poorly made capacitors are another common culprit. There may not be much sonic difference between a $20 cap and a $100 cap, but there is a huge difference between a $20 cap and a 10-cent cap! (Both of which can be found in an audio preamplifiers.)
Spaciousness is very simply the sense of 3-dimensions coming from your speakers. Confusing this issue to some degree is that there are two elements of space you hear: one is what is truly a part of the recording, for instance a voice located in a space with a mic will reveal some aspects of that space, and the other is the "trick" which loudspeakers play when placed various ways in rooms. This is the reverberant field of the room in which the speakers are playing and has nothing to do with either the quality of the recording or the electronics playing it back. The "space" I am trying to preserve in the electronic chain is the subtle micro-detail pf spatial references captured in the original recording.
So that's it - when I get a design to embrace those three qualities, it sounds to my ear like music - juicy music!
Business ModelWe have been selling direct on the Internet since we began in 2003. Although there are a few downsides to online shopping for audio gear, we think the benefit of a much lower price offsets those downsides, and provides a valuable alternative to the in-store experience. We support our customers directly. When you call with a question or a problem, you will be talking directly to the designer and builder of the piece you own. It doesn't get any more direct than that.
