Audio Alchemy was a
high end
In economics, a luxury good (or upmarket good) is a good for which demand increases more than what is proportional as income rises, so that expenditures on the good become a greater proportion of overall spending. Luxury goods are in contrast to n ...
audio equipment manufacturer based in
California
California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...
, USA. The company was first formed in the late 1980s, producing many lines of relatively affordable audio products, including
CD players, transports, digital audio processors, and amplifiers. It went out of business in the late 1990s, was briefly relaunched in the early 2000s as Alchemy2, then was relaunched under the original Audio Alchemy name in early 2015 with a new line of higher-quality, full-featured audio products.
On October 6, 2016 Audio Alchemy was acquired by
Elac
ELAC is a German loudspeaker manufacturer. It was founded in 1926 as 'Electroacustic GmbH'.
During World War II, it built electroacoustic devices for the Kriegsmarine and other nautical applications, and the company reached a peak of 5,000 sta ...
.
Audio Alchemy products make innovative use of the I²S audio interface, usually reserved for the internal connection between the CD transport and DAC of a CD player. Audio Alchemy brought the interface out to a DIN connector, allowing a very low jitter
In electronics and telecommunications, jitter is the deviation from true periodicity of a presumably periodic signal, often in relation to a reference clock signal. In clock recovery applications it is called timing jitter. Jitter is a significa ...
connection between the CD transport and external DAC, by transmitting the clock signal and the audio signal in parallel. This offers a superior alternative connectivity method to something like S/PDIF, which sees the clock signal embedded into the audio signal. The process of extracting the clock signal from the data stream is where jitter
In electronics and telecommunications, jitter is the deviation from true periodicity of a presumably periodic signal, often in relation to a reference clock signal. In clock recovery applications it is called timing jitter. Jitter is a significa ...
is introduced. This interface is used in several original Audio Alchemy products and in the relaunched company's products.
Perpetual Technologies and Camelot Technology also produce products that use the I²S interface.
External links
Alchemy Series , ELAC
"Audio Alchemy website"
Retrieved 2015-04-23
References
{{reflist
Audio equipment manufacturers of the United States