Welcome! At Raindrop Audio our love for music drives the search for a sound so real and naturally musical, it effortlessly draws you into the performance. You’ll find yourself totally immersed, eyes shut and feet tapping, savouring the sweet sound of music…
Realism and musicality are our goals – as a means to deepen your immersion into music and heighten your enjoyment and appreciation of it.
We are working on a new website… meanwhile here are the latest product arrivals:
Gradient Helsinki 1.5
The Gradient Helsinki 1.5 is a work of art; a brilliant effort by designer Jorma Salmi to literally sculpt the soundfield into a expansive and holographic experience.
“This unusual design from Gradient’s Jorma Salmi, with wave-guided tweeter, disc-mounted midrange, and side-firing dipole woofer, is intended to erase your listening room from the sound you hear. And it delivers the goods: Few other speakers can give you an equal sense of being transported to the performance venue. With the right setup, its spatial performance is at the top level attainable at any price.” – Editors Choice Award 2011, The Absolute Sound
The Audeze LCD-2 Planar Magnetic Headphones
The Audeze LCD-2 headphone features state-of-the-art Planar Magnetic drivers, enabling a realism in sound that is quite simply, extraordinary.
Every component of the LCD-2 is precision engineered with one goal in mind: Recreate the sound exactly like the artist intended. LCD-2 combines leading edge technology and development with knowledge, feedback and suggestions from an on-going dialogue with Sound Engineers and Audiophiles. The Audeze LCD-2 uses a proprietary thin film diaphragm that is housed between a unique super efficient push-pull magnetic structure. Audeze’s manufacturing process combined with the advanced materials and technology produce extremely accurate and incredible sounding headphones. The LCD-2s are made of hand selected Carribean Rosewood. The sloped earpads are made of premium lambskin leather with specially selected foam to offer the right amount of firmness.
The M2Tech Evo Supply alongside the HiFace Evo
M2Tech‘s new Evo Supply is a battery-based power supply designed specifically to improve the performance of the M2Tech hiFace Evo 24-bit 192-kHz USB-to-digital audio interface.
Evo Supply features a Li-Ion battery with 2200mAh capacity, an integrated battery charger and a low-noise regulator which is used to provide current to the load while the battery is being charged, thus ensuring continuous operation.
Ayon Triton Mono's
Following the success of the Triton II Integrated, the new Ayon Triton Monos arrived and immediately makes clear its wider power bandwidth with more speed, top-end air, detailed resolution and more impactful bass.
The Triton Monos have a wonderful ability to unravel complex musical threads with grainless purity and stunning dynamics. The Triton Monos are full-featured balanced class-A vacuum tube mono power amplifiers, switchable between pentode (100W) and triode (60W) mode. Super-wide bandwidth output transformers sealed with anti-resonance elements means the Triton series are able to drive even more difficult speaker loads.
Guru QM10two in piano black and glossy white. Also available in Ferrari Red!
One of our best selling speakers just got a performance boost!
The Guru QM10two is the successor of the critically acclaimed QM10 and introduces two new advanced proprietary drivers into the compact and elegant QM10 design. The improve drivers raised the bandwidth to a typical in room response of 30 Hz to 30 kHz and at the same time lower distortion even further whilst greatly improving the time domain behaviour of the loudspeaker. All this results in even greater resolution and transparency with increased soundstage precision whilst maintaining incredibly low frequency extension.
ZYX 4D MC Cartridge
It is a joy listening to a ZYX cartridge playing music. Wonderful, mesmerising music. The work of Hisayoshi Nakatsuka is highly respected and well known to be among the best sounding MC Phono Cartridges in the world.
“In my opinion, ZYX designer Hisayoshi Nakatsuka has easily met his design goals for the 4D-G cartridge. Never have I heard a cartridge sound so unstrained when unraveling complex musical passages. Even when many different instruments are all playing at once with each competing for attention, the 4D-G remains composed and delivers each instrument with unprecedented vividness and authenticity.” – Frank Alles, Stereotimes.
The new GigaWatt PC-3 SE EVO
Since the GigaWatt power conditioners arrived recently they have transformed a good number of customer systems. Focus and transparency is turned up a clear notch, and dynamic swings flow with greater ease. A darker background allows more details and micro-dynamics to emerge, conveying in a heightened sense the tonality of instruments, voice and ambience of the recording venue.
The key to this performance is Gigawatt’s extraordinary attention to power distribution, protection, isolation and anti-noise filtering, with a determined criteria that power delivery must not be limited in anyway. Build quality is first-class and attention to details is superb. It is simply evident from the products that the team at GigaWatt are perfectionists. Indeed, GigaWatt is well known to custom-manufacture many of the key components in their products, instead of simply wiring together off-the-shelf parts. More information coming soon…
Tellurium Q Black Speaker Cable
When the engineering team at Tellurium Q (based in the UK) studied the factors impacting speaker cable performance, they realised that phase distortion is a key determinant of cable performance, and yet not addressed by current audio R&D. So they started designing from a blank slate, with a determined focus to combat phase distortion. The result is the first Tellurium cable – the Black – with ultra low phase distortion. The cable also has low capacitance and very high bandwidth but primarily it is the superbly low phase distortion that make these cables sound extraordinarily clear and natural. These high performance cables have won multiple awards in their very first year of launch!
Red Wine Audio Isabellina HPA LFP-V battery-powered valve DAC and headamp
Red Wine Audio’s new LFP-V Edition components now combines advanced battery technology and a brilliant vacuum valve stage, and the results are fantastic!
Red Wine Audio has been the innovator and leader in battery-driven HiFi, and is now the first to use advanced Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries. All LFP-V Edition components also feature a new vacuum-tube stage, battery-powered of course! Now the Signature amplifiers, Isabella pre-amplifier, Isabellina DAC and headphone amp are better than ever. And there’s a new addition to the family too – the Ginevra LFP-V phonostage…
“…the Diva II SP produced sound so enticing that I listened night and night to all kinds of music, constantly surprised by its high level of performance, and telling myself that if times got tough and I had to sell my big rig, I could listen happily ever after to the Diva II SP. That’s how well balanced and robust its overall sound was.” – Michael Fremer, Stereophile. Check out this recent review here.
Ayon CD-5s
The CD-5s is Ayon’s new flagship CD Player, and has been just awared The Absolute Sound magazine’s 2011 Editor’s Choice Award!
This is a state-of-the-art CD player and DAC with pre-amplifier rolled into one. The CD-5s’ pure class-A fully-balanced valve output stage features 4 x 6H30 valves, also known as “Super Tube” for its high specifications and great reliability. The Ayon CD-5s establishes a new benchmark in triode vacuum-tube CD-Player performance by combining a state-of-the-art single-ended tube output stage with tube rectified current sources in the power supply. Based on a zero-feedback, pure tube circuit design with Philips’ well regarded CD-Pro2 mechanism, 4 units of Burr Brown 1704 true multi-bit DAC with upsampling 24 bit/192 kHz, the CD-5s reveals the manifold layers of music with utmost transparency while projecting a deep and highly focused 3D soundstage. The CD-5s Reference CD-Player also offers AES/EBU, SPDIF digital inputs supporting high-resolution audio up to 24-bit 192 kHz, as well as Toslink and USB inputs. Made in Austria. For product reviews click here.
Davone Ray
Davone Audio’s new Ray loudspeaker continues the Rithm‘s legacy of unifying gorgeous design with high end audio performance.
Designer Paul Schenkel have meticulously devised the fluid cabinet shape to achieve the intended acoustic behaviour; something not possible with the typical box enclosure. The result is an exceptionally inert and beautifully styled cabinet; hand crafted in Denmark with specially molded wood panels.
The driver is a custom-built point source capable of outstanding imaging and focus. This is achieved using the highly regarded 1″ Illuminator tweeter and a high performance 8″ bass driver in a coaxial arrangement.
The result is a work of art, sonically and stylistically. Put your feet up, open a bottle and enjoy the glorious music!
... feel every musical note ...
... every raindrop in the storm ...
Because the mind is free --
Listening to the rain
Dripping from the eaves,
The drops become
One with me
...Dogen (1200 - 1253)
