California Audio Labs Factory Tour
by Srajan Ebaen

Check out any map of the famous and fabulous Sunny State. Depending on which region you pick, you might react along the following lines if challenged to contain your responses to words starting with the letters c-a-l.

Zero in on Southern California’s continuous suburban stretch from Laguna Beach to northern San Diego, for example. You could feel calamitous over the callous californication of blatant over-development, strip malls and gridlock traffic. Los Angeles -- or Lalaland as called by its natives -- might bring to mind calzones in Calabasas and Calvin Klein designer jeans on Rodeo drive. Think calluses, swollen calves and calcium supplements if you’re into calisthenics or pumping it up with the musclemen on Venice Beach. Pick your nose and envision calipers tugging away in the endless plastic surgery salons of the Valley. Prepare for calumnious statements in the Hollywood Reporter while you calculate the costs of suing the callow paparazzi, then calm your frazzled nerves in one of the famous mud baths of Calistoga.

How about Northern California, though, just shy of Oregon? You know it’s Chinook salmon country and giant redwoods capital of the West Coast. Arcata sports a downtown square where cognoscenti of the cannabis weed can legally smoke a reefer but pay a fine for going Cuban with a cigar. But how to feel about this?

Well, if you’re at a loss, think CAL to the rescue. Calibrate your recalcitrant audio system to calypso tunes provided by Andy Narell. Does that get your audiophiles juices flowing? It should. Put the map aside now.

California Audio Labs, or CAL for short, is the audio specialty branch of the US-based Sensory Science Corporation. Being manufactured and/or marketed under its 100+ employees strong umbrella, you’ll discover the CAL, Go Video, Loewe TV and Rave MP3 brands. Sensory Science Corp. is headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona. However, the main engineering and manufacturing core personnel involved with the CAL products is elsewhere. They’ve picked the misty-weathered hamlet of Blue Lake, Humboldt County for their present nexus of operations. The former pastures in Southern California’s Irvine were relinquished for a greener spot northern-most as possible without putting a lie to their name by leaving the state.

Touring the Blue Lake facility just north of Eureka and inland from coastal Trinidad, subliminal strains of something akin to a Star Wars conceptual brief keep surfacing in my mind: "Once upon a time, on a lone desert planet on the very outskirts of the Evil Empire, a motley crew of rebels-in-hiding is preparing for a covert but all-out assault."

Never mind the motley -- the CAL engineers and assembly folks are anything but. As far as the assault on the empire goes, you be the judge. However, in keeping with CAL's chosen "off-the-grid" environment, I see muddy bicycles parked against the walls of inside hallways. Outside under cloudy skies, a yellow county sign within throwing distance of the parking lot reads, "Congested Area." Behind it and as far as the eye can see, there’s a wide-open expanse of meadows, fields and rolling mountains steaming with moisture. It’s a puzzling reality check. What might seem claustrophobic to some wilder characters in them thar hills -- aka a small industrial park on the outskirts of an old logging village -- appears like a virtual while wet paradise to a city dweller like myself.

Meet Steve Brunner, international sales & marketing director, product trainer and liaison between CAL and yours truly (Steve appears in opening photo). He excuses his apparel of shorts and ankle boots. He claims that his body overheats in regular pantalones. Yeah, sure. I rather think he’s in character. I bet he’s more comfortable in those down-home threads than the extra fancy reed-colored double-breaster and woven Italian wing tips I’ve spotted him wearing to perfection during CES. That puts him now on even footing with my well-faded jeans, smooth Ostrich boots and wrinkled T-shirt. No pretensions are necessary or called for -- we’re both regular working dudes and don’t have to put on a show to impress each other. Let the product speak for itself. I’ve owned a CL-10 for years and talked to the CAL boys on occasion. They feel comfortable with me and so do I with them.

Indeed, I find it very much to the CAL team’s credit that they don’t turn my visit into a carefully orchestrated red-carpet affair. Instead, they let me touch down into their midst during a regular, utterly unrehearsed day. Rather than being bent over rows upon rows of huge MCA five-channel amplifiers I was promised stacked ten deep on the rollers -- a delay in circuit boards has the assembly line starting two days after I leave -- I find the team engaged in day-to-day routine. Product and strategy meetings. Servicing older units. Dealing with dealer queries and foreign orders. Running errands. Suffering an inept reviewer on the phone. It’s manufacturing business as usual. I’m invited to snoop around freely.

On back, I find an office into which corner is jammed an audio system. It consists of Magnepan 1.6s driven by a CAL front-end, Audio Research preamp and Adcom power amp. This is a sure-bet indicator that whoever occupies that office works at CAL because he or she loves music. I never find out what this worker considers appropriate for a main system. If planar speakers are relegated to the office, what’s playing at home? I make a note to myself: Must reconsider my own miniature Boston PC speakers in the home office! Doesn’t Bruce Thigpen of Eminent Tech make planar mini-speakers for computers?

Besides countless blueprints and 3D mock-ups of chassis and remotes (pictured left), I also find hair-raising pix of surfer dudes defying wisdom, gravity and mortality on a few office dividers. Brunner explains that the swells on the Northern California coast are famous for both their consistency and size during the freezing winter months. This doesn’t make it a Mecca for the jet set, but it does separate the men from the boys. It beckons to the truly dedicated aquatic fiends hiding in those hills whose names no surfer pro would recognize though he’d admire their stamina and courage. Steve’s a water rat himself. Being married with two kids, he no longer solos but still hits the surf when the tide’s up. He also bikes. Besides this important stuff, he writes all the CAL owner’s manuals, most the ad copy and promotional materials and attempts to materialize the mandates from on high for quarterly sales expectations, international market penetration as well as dealer familiarity with the products. He explains that chief engineer Dan Donnelly’s brother Ray is fluent in C+ and C++ software code. While that’s Swahili to me, it simply means that Ray receives job offers from headhunters at least twice a month. He could go to work for any firm anywhere. His qualifications far exceed that of most engineers working for the major audio companies. While they have to rely on chip-makers to supply attendant software, CAL is able to write its own. This is fascinating and brainy stuff. I will talk with Dan later -- suffice to say right now that he’s one seriously sharp cookie himself. That’s no chocolate mousse between his ears. I don’t know how to field the right questions to get him past what must be blatant kindergarten ABCs to him. But it’s clear as a whistle that he can dissect and analyze any circuit down to its most minute component or write a nasty computer virus with his bro if they were so inclined.

I spot plenty of evidence to support a crazy private notion that this factory is somewhat of a think tank cum semi-mobile design lab. It seems structured in such a way as to allow the resident engineers the unencumbered mental space to be unconstrained and inventive and build the actual product for now. At a later time and if required, the entire operation could get transplanted elsewhere, possibly even absorbed into the Arizona facility. For the time being, this team of iconoclastic thinkers and engineers seems tethered to the Parent Corporation primarily by phone and modem, plus the occasional and infrequent executive visit via SF airport and a subsequent 3.5-hour road trip. With their mission statement to advance the state of the art of Sensory Science’s home-theater division, CAL seems to relish a pretty long rope they’ve been granted in this setup. It allows them to fulfill their corporate objectives and obligations while simultaneously sharpening their traditional and well-known two-channel focus. They get to do so with the full financial R&D support of a publicly traded company but without giving up most of their autonomy. They’re not forced to physically operate in the large corporate environment of upscale, if-you-don’t-play-golf-then-move-to-Phoenix headquarters of Scottsdale. Whereas most buy-outs, takeovers or mergers strip the former independents of their own identity, the executive officers at Sensory Science seem steadfastly committed to maintaining California Audio Lab’s legacy as a pioneer of audiophile digital front-end components. They’ve simply added new product assignments to CAL. This addresses the burgeoning domestic home-theater market for Sensory Science beyond its established but predominantly foreign Go Video VCR deck sales. By additionally acquiring the exclusive distribution rights for the German Loewe TV marquee, the corporation has added yet another major player to its roster of offerings. Since the US market required new software and different on-screen menus from the European models, Sensory took on the manufacture of US-destined Loewe TV sets in a Tennessee-based plant and writes its own code and programming. Needless to say, the CAL team has access to all that additional brain power and R&D department if its own in-house resources require add-ons.

Audiophile-caliber performance manifests itself first and foremost in music-only applications -- after all, home theater can only be as good as its music and voice constituents. That Sensory Science is dedicated to music over mayhem can be seen immediately in a few obvious features in the new 2500-series components. The power supplies of the massive MCA amplifier ("open" amplifier shown right), for example, are arranged such that the left-front/rear, right-front/rear and center channels are individually dedicated. This grouping is unusual but makes immediate sense when you think two-channel -- the left and right channels are now truly mono without sharing supplies as they would be if the front channels and rear channels were sourced jointly, as is common. Via its RS-232 bi-directional communication port, the SSP processor can power down the unused channels into hibernation mode to effectively take them out of the circuit. Also, it can be operated in analog-bypass mode utterly divorced from any digital circuitry, thus turning it into a preamp with state-of-the-art ambitions. It’s obvious that serious two-channel applications are not only anticipated but also overtly suggested. These home-theater products seem designed with audiophile music applications in mind first. However, truly sophisticated multichannel usage is equally accounted for -- maybe a case of having your cake and eating it too?

Before we get into the new 2500 series -- available in all its four components by the time this article goes online and a direct result of the 1998 merger of California Audio Labs with Sensory Science Corp. -- let’s do a bit of history first to appreciate some evolution.

To wit: In the beginning there was sound. The sound was digital and it was no good.

That was 15 years ago. What’s happened between then and now? Let’s find out.

It’s 1985. Art Paymer and four engineers, among them Dan Donnelly and Mike Ferreira, start what becomes California Audio Labs out of a garage. Dan Donnelly, to this day CAL’s senior and chief engineer (shown left), obtains his technical training in the air force. He later serves a tour of duty in audio retail, where he eventually becomes involved with modifying early AudioQuest CD players. His move to CAL will see him design product from the ground up rather than continue to modify early Phillips Magnavox and Sony players. Ferreira, whose engineering brilliance requires manly challenges to stay put in any place for extended periods, drifts in and out of the core team as in-house availability of serious projects require. He is actively associated with CAL to this day, as are Ray Donnelly (software), Scott Morrison (hardware) and Tom Cary (mechanical engineer) who joined the team over the years.

The January 1986 CES sees the introduction of the world’s first audiophile, tube-powered, analog-output-stage CD player, the original CAL Tempest I.

Between 1986 and 1988, the SLC line-level preamp is added, which retails for $995 and briefly sees Mike Moffat involved. He comes as a service tech from Neil Sinclair’s audio store. CAL subsequently hires Neil as sales and marketing director. In that capacity, Neil organizes the systematic creation of a dealer network, which since then has grown to 150+ strong in the US alone. In late 1988, Sinclair and Moffat leave to start Theta Digital and pursue their own ideas of digital separates. The same year sees the emergence of the Tempest II with outboard power supply, which soon becomes the de facto industry reference for digital playback for the next few years.

In 1989, the Tempest II evolves into the Special Edition with upgrades to the internal DACs from 16 to 18 bits. Competitor Wadia introduces its 2000 digital-to-analog processor. Bob Altenbern, proprietor of Haven & Harvesty specialty audio store in Huntington Beach, joins the CAL team. His partner, Curtis Haven, eventually relocates the store and today operates an establishment on the coast south of Seattle. Steve Brunner, a regular customer at H&H, is drafted into CAL the same year.

Between 1989 and 1999, more than 27,000 units of the $685 CAL Icon CD player are sold, making it one of the most successful, long-lived high-end products ever.

In 1990, the $650 Sigma DAC appears on the scene as the world’s first standalone tube-powered DAC.

In 1992, the Alpha/Delta combo follows suit, and CAL builds its own off-shore factory in Thailand, where it oversees set-up and the hands-on training of assembly personnel to manufacture its entry-level gear like the little Gamma DAC. CAL also begins to accept OEM contract work and becomes the supplier for Blaupunkt car-audio amps. Digital-design work follows for US brands that can’t be openly identified due to standard non-disclosure agreements. It is kosher to mention, though, that on any given Sunday their products can be found in Stereophile Class A and B lists of components. Even today, CAL does OEM and contract design work for other audio firms. In fact, this anonymous contract work is one of the main reasons why it has taken CAL until now to design components other than CD players under its own brand name.

In 1994, CAL acquires the remaining assets of the Pulsar Video Projector brand and begins to design and manufacture three-gun projectors under the Cinevision brand. In the same year, CAL and Paul Hales of Hales Loudspeaker Co. join forces to form the new Hales Design Group. A year later, Hales separates to again follow the prompting of his very own woofer -- ahem, drummer.

In 1995, the CAL CL-5 becomes the world’s first audiophile CD changer and enters the market at $1495.

1997 sees the company move from Irvine to Blue Lake.

In April of 1998, Go Video acquires California Audio Labs and, effective 1/1/99, is renamed Sensory Science Corporation, a fully US-based, publicly traded company with headquarters in Scottsdale, AZ.

August 1999 sees the finalization of the 2500-series SSP surround-sound processor and VSW video switcher, which are introduced at CES 2000 in the stationary Sensory Science exhibit. An active system is also loaned to AAD, a new speaker company manufacturing designs by Phil Jones of Platinum Audio and Acoustic Energy fame.

May 2000 adds the MCA and DVD player into full production and brings us full circle into the present moment of now.

This summary overview contains quite a few industry firsts. Still, it leaves out a lot. Regardless, it clearly shows that the CAL team from the very beginning pursued its own vision. At the time, they clearly didn’t believe in the perfect sound forever of early CD players. Employing tubes in the output stage to ameliorate the harshness of digititis significantly predated such latter-day scenarios as the current Audio Aero or BAT players. Our history brief also illustrates nicely how the CAL core team was culled from music enthusiasts out of the retail scene -- store owners, service technicians or customers. This might explain the particular roll-up-your-sleeves outsider’s profile of California Audio Labs the company, prior and even after its merger with Sensory Science. It has me go back to words like rebellious and iconoclastic.

Take the new MCA amplifier, for example. It’s the brainchild of Dan Donnelly and Mike Ferreira, who returned to CAL as project manager for this occasion and is said to thrive only on the most challenging of prospects. The MCA took three years of development. Such lab seclusion is possible only with very solid funding. It therefore is usually not the domain of smaller specialty firms but the exclusive domicile and rightfully publicized advantage of huge conglomerates like Madrigal and Boston Acoustics. To be welcomed into the Sensory Science family has bestowed bulging marketing muscle and intensive R&D reliance to CAL. It has significantly broadened the type of projects on which its engineers can now sharpen their teeth. As the amp project proves, they get to take time and, on this occasion, rethink entire circuit topologies rather than playing minor-key variations on old themes. Donnelly admits that precious little data were available to use as initial bearings to survey existing options -- amplifiers this powerful hadn’t been attempted before, especially not with the high-end sonic ambitions CAL was pursuing. The somewhat simultaneous release of the Linn Klimax amp has Steve Brunner and me reflect on similar events in the movie industry. It’s very common but surprising nonetheless that one year might see the parallel introduction of three Robin Hood movies or dual earthquake or asteroid disaster flicks, multiple Joan of Arc retellings or the-protagonist-has-been-dead-throughout-the-entire-movie perspectives. In most cases, the movie producers and developers who cleared the shoot had no inkling of any competing projects underway -- until their press releases proved otherwise.

Ditto for the Klimax/MCA appearances. The CAL engineers took a close look at the Linn solution when the Klimax first arrived on the scene. They describe it as a similar idea but with a different direction of ascent to the same peak. One difference immediately obvious to this punter is price. The Linn offers 250Wpc at $9,950 per channel. The MCA beckons with 500Wpc at $1500 per channel. If sonics are even remotely in the same camp, this debate is of interest only to those for whom price is a non-issue.

Never mind that the 2500-series has barely been introduced -- I ask what new projects might be on the horizon for CAL. I’m told to anticipate a 1500-series that will revisit the 2500 scenery at lower price points. I also perceive some top-secret rumblings about work involving future Internet/PC/DVD integration. But besides one erratic blip, this is intentionally kept below my radar screen for obvious reasons.

For now, two patents have been applied for to protect novel wrinkles in the amplification field explored and finalized in the new, massively powerful MCA amplifier. One patent is sought for the way in which bias is controlled via microchips. The other concerns itself with the unique implementation of the Zero-Voltage-Transition high-voltage power supply that previously has been used in the military and industrial sectors only. Commenting on the unique cosmetics of the 2500 series, Steve Brunner identifies the firm "Design Works" in Los Angeles that owns the exclusive design contract for the interiors of all BMW automobiles sold in the US. The same firm was contracted to design the looks of the 2500-series. I find it refreshing to see how corporate strength used wisely can tread the fine line between commercial viability, artistic expression and technological advances without seeming to lose balance.

Dan Donnelly shows me a prototype of the new 2500-series DVD player (shown right). It will go into full production a week after my visit. He inserts a CD-ROM to demonstrate how the flash memory of the DVD player can be upgraded to incorporate new software when it becomes available. For example, the popular movie Matrix apparently has a white rabbit program embedded that isn’t accessible to all DVD players currently on the market. Dan explains that the digital audio industry is notorious for not making available new codes when they've been developed and implemented into software. It makes it absolutely impossible for any digital hardware manufacturer to design product that isn’t obsolete the very moment it enters the market. The solution, of course, is to provide an upgrade path. However, there’s slightly more to the picture than this short mandate suggests. When new software codes appear, their developers often don’t make them available unless manufacturers purchase their proprietary chips. Integrating new chips into the architecture of existing models is prohibitive for obvious reasons; not the least of these is either a recall or a voluntary return-for-service call. The latter is certainly possible but not very desirable, especially in high-end custom installations where downtime might be unacceptable. One way around this conundrum is to reverse-engineer the new software codes, regenerate them as autoexec files and provide a means to download such files onto one’s own hardware. This, of course, requires very serious code-writing talent on the part of the hardware makers. CAL is proud to possess such talent.

I’m shown numerous examples in the new products whereby all conceivable pains have been taken to assure non-obsolescence. The most obvious is a computer RS-232 serial port to provide the physical link to a PC. Computer hookup also allows access to sub-menu options such as dither settings on a CD or DVD player or advanced choices on a monitor or screen. Because SoundStage! has been offered an exclusive look at a complete 2500-series system, which consists of the DVD player, surround-sound processor, video switcher and five-channel amp, I will leave discussion of the technical solutions, features and performance to the reviewer chosen for this assignment. Suffice to say at this juncture that I have used the processor and amp in two-channel mode and envy the reviewer.

Being heavily engineering-driven can backfire on occasion. Steve Brunner points out that after printing their elaborate brochure for the 2500 series and comparing their published specs to competitors, he noticed a discrepancy. The CAL MCA amp is spec’d at 500Wpc x 5 continuous with 0.05% distortion and runs in full class A up to 50Wpc x 5 continuous. Other manufacturers spec their amplifiers at 1% distortion. Steve laconically quips that the MCA outputs 750Wpc x 5 continuous into 8 ohms if a 1% distortion spec were acceptable. What to say? Being part of a conservative $100,000,000 company does have its drawbacks?

Yes, you read this annual turnover figure correctly. Sensory Science is a major player in the international arena of audio/video companies. Unless executive management changes its direction, the confluence of talent, vision and the means to implement them successfully bode well for CAL’s future. It bodes equally well for us consumers who should continue to expect high-value, peak-performance products from this remote outpost of audio mavens somewhere in them thar hills off the foggy Northern California coast.

Take a look at the three-tiered architecture of the CL-2500 SSP processor (right). The digital, analog and support circuitry are separated onto three different boards and feature numerous high-power processors, not the least of which is a Motorola Coldfire 32-bit RISC chip and top-of-the-line Burr-Brown 24-bit/96kHz dual-colinear converter on all channels. How about 29 user-programmable presets? They’re accessible via two simple controls of scroll-select-enter and are ridiculously intuitive to use. Yes, easy even for someone like me who is a devout music-only flat-earther and would look at a blinking VCR clock to this day if he couldn’t read manuals. If I were to mention the SSP’s dynamic range of 120dB and a signal-to-noise ratio of 123dB, I’d get not only into specmanship but also territory that our product review will cover in-depth.

Nonetheless, it should be clear that the focus of CAL continues to be what it always was -- audiophile-caliber, real-world-priced gear for the music enthusiast. And I have a pretty good grasp on why that’s so. These folks from the Audio Lab in California are themselves real-world music lovers who would rather live in relative seclusion to do their thing uncorrupted than be co-opted into a huge, well-greased corporate machine. Such machines, while often endowed with attractive perks, can have a disconcerting habit of claiming that excellent sonics are for nerds only and to get on with the massive volume-sales program of mediocrity. In the case of CAL, I dare say such ruminations would be missing the target by a few miles. While I haven’t had a chance yet to visit the corporate headquarters of Sensory Science, I would be surprised if I didn’t get a similarly casual yet performance-intensive vibe to the one in Blue Lake. How else to explain the existence of the CAL outpost in Northern California?

In closing, I thoroughly enjoyed my visit to Blue Lake and thank everyone I met for their hospitality and willingness to be interviewed and harassed with a camera. I look forward to reading what our reviewer will have to report on the performance of the new CAL 2500-series home-theater system. The pictures embedded into the text of this article should give you a good inkling of the environment in which these components were conceived, designed, perfected and are now built and shipped.

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To find out more about California Audio Labs
visit their website at www.calaudio.com