TEAC was founded in Tokyo in 1953, with a quest to build audio products that will genuinely record and reproduce the original sound. This original sound has rung across the world through recordings like R2-D2's voice in the first star wars movie, Springsteen's "Nebraska" album, and countless other timeless recordings. From the early days of reel-to-reel decks to today's digital age of high-resolution playback, media has changed dramatically, but TEAC's vision remained the same.
Our attraction to TEAC was first and foremost the sound. They have an effortless, unconstrained sound with excellent transparency and information retrieval. The adjustability in their DACs is especially lovely with the ability to tailor a variety of upsampling options, as well as which digital filters.
Their design is fantastic and timeless, with a semi-industrial design but with excellent fit, finish, and great touch points. When you flip a switch or turn a knob, their pieces truly feel polished. The musicality TEAC extracts from these fairly compact chassis is infectious!
With TEAC, you're getting the focused effort of decades of research in each internal piece of each component. Their transports directly influenced by their development of the Esoteric VRDS drives, widely regarded as some of the best in the world. Their DACs are similarly based on the Esoteric line, made in-house and of their own discrete component design; this isn't an off-the-shelf DAC slapped into a chassis. The entire TEAC line features so many distilled features from their flagship it's truly impressive!
Currently on demo, we have the TEAC AP-701 Stereo Amplifier, VRDS-701 CD Player / DAC / Preamp Combo unit, and their external clock the CG-10M-A to keep everything in time.
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