The Right Amount of Integration

The Right Amount of Integration

When it comes to hi-fi gear, how much functional integration in a box is good and how much is too much? Is that product that includes a streamer, a DAC with Bluetooth, a preamp, and a power amplifier really going to serve your long-term musical interests? Or does the path to long-term happiness require some separation of concerns? This post attempts to answer some of these questions from an AVA perspective.

Summertime

For many people, summer is a time to relax and take it easy. Not so for us! A lot has been happening here. Most notably, for only the second time in its existence, AVA has moved. It's only a couple miles, but as anyone who has moved house knows, distance barely figures into how much work it is.

We're really looking forward to serving everyone better than ever before once we're done setting up the new space. But we're still working out the kinks. (Thank-you internet service provider for having so much difficulty moving our phone number to the new location.) Your patience is eternally appreciated while we finish things up -- and especially until we have phone service that doesn't divert everyone into voice mail.

In other news, we've been busy with exciting new R&D projects and will report anything solid as soon as it's solid. It's taken forever, but things have finally gotten back to normal with most suppliers since the COVID-19 Great Parts Apocalypse™. It's a tremendous relief that we can finally think about new products again.

And of course we've been crazy busy building you the great gear that you love. We're all looking forward to doing much more of that!

Hello.

Welcome to this inaugural installment of From Mithat's Desk at Audio by Van Alstine.

My name is Mithat Konar, and I design products for Audio by Van Alstine. In this space, I plan to post about audio stuff as it relates to AVA. Things that I'd like you to know. Things I might be excited about. And, occasionally, things that might be a cause for concern.

Stay tuned. There's more to come.