Opinion

The simple white building in Watsonville, California offers not a hint about what takes place inside – the design and production of some of the world’s most advanced audio gear, including three models of digital-to-analogue converters, four models of power amplifiers, and various accessories.

Founded in 1987 and incorporated two years later, MSB Technology began with two people in a small garage-like space. Today it owns and occupies a former auto dealership, has 16 employees, and ships to distributors worldwide, which in turn serve approximately 200 dealers.

Roll up, roll up

The company recently hosted a factory tour arranged through the Audiophile Foundation, until last year known as the San Francisco Bay Area Audiophile Society. The name change was part of a drive to reach audio enthusiasts outside the SF region – Watsonville is around 90 miles south. While not an official member of the Foundation, I’ve attended some events and took advantage of an invitation to the MSB tour.

The few hours we spent with the company’s CEO Jonathan Gullman, product designer Daniel Francis, and circuit designer Dustin Symanski, were enlightening, and the tour was a surprise on many fronts – not least the hyper-logical arrangement of everything in the building and its hospital-grade cleanliness. MSB doesn’t make its own chips and transistors, so there’s no need for masks and hazmat suits, but the company’s work space is pristine.

So is its attention to maximum productivity – tedious, low-skilled jobs are mostly handled by robotic machines – and to being environmentally conscious. Each MSB chassis is carved from a block of aluminium by automated milling machines, and scrap is fed into large bins for recycling. Readers with industrial experience will know how filthy production facilities can be. Here, you’d have to look hard to find anything out of place or lying about on the floor. It’s an old cliché, but you could eat lunch on any workbench in the place.

MSB is as ‘vertically integrated’ as possible, meaning that almost everything in each product is made on site. This includes feet, knobs, and bolts – parts often outsourced by many manufacturers. Daniel Francis joked about wanting to buy a screw-making machine, although the profitability of that versus buying screws in bulk may be questionable...

Small details

There’s minimal hand-soldering in any finished product. All printed circuit boards are populated and soldered by precision machinery that not only prevents the overheating of any onboard components but also monitors the position of every one of them right down to the size and shape of solder joints. Leads on chips and transistors are bent and cut by machine, preventing human errors. Each subassembly gets as many as 100,000 instantaneous inspections during build-out. Any piece provoking an error alert is pulled off the line and reworked. Such attention to detail means very low failure rates for finished products. When needed, repairs are done in Watsonville.

Symanski asserted that MSB avoids buying Chinese components, instead sourcing semiconductors, capacitors, resistors, etc, from other Asian countries if they can’t be found locally in California. Proximity to Silicon Valley means there is little need to go far seeking parts such as two-layer circuit boards.

Wire worry

MSB’s structurally isolated listening room has been comprehensively acoustically treated – not dead-silent, but with an open transparency that reveals all. With a marble floor covered in a thick rug, a high ceiling and absorber/diffuser panels everywhere, it’s a hi-fi widow’s nightmare but a sonic wonder. An amusing aspect was some skimpy two-conductor speaker wire that provoked alarm from some of the audiophile visitors. Whatever it was sounded marvellous.