Lavry Engineering, located in Kingston, Washington, was founded in 1993 as dB Technologies. The name was changed in 2002 to Lavry Engineering. Widely known simply as “Lavry”, the company specializes in products designed to satisfy the growing demand for hi-res digital audio performance. Lavry’s design philosophy is that any signal chain, electronics should ideally contribute no sonic colorations or other such distortions unless the distortions are an optional artistic decision (such as EQ or reverb). Transparency is a difficult challenge, but this company has excelled in making some of the “cleanest” most accurate sound on the market to date.
DAN LAVRY – COMPANY FOUNDER AND ENGINEER
I first became interested in electronics for audio in the mid 80’s. My previous work as a designer goes back to the early 70’s when I began to acquire my basic design skills designing circuits for telephone traffic measurement gear.
During the next few years, I learned high speed digital circuits, wide band precision analog, system architecture and more while working on projects such as:
State of the art IC test systems (high speed) for IBM and Toshiba
State of the art time interval generator (programmable down to 10ps steps) for Hughes
State of the art AD converter (8 bits at 100MHz) for EH research.
As a mature designer, I acquired appreciation for timing accuracy, including jitter issues when designing some specialized pulse generators (tail pulse generators) for physics research labs. I then spent a few years designing super accurate time interval meters for the aviation industry. That project was all about fine timing, clocks and low jitter issues.
My appreciation for low noise and high dynamic range began during the design of front end amplifiers (gain up to a million). The amplifier project (for Nicollet biomedical) included programmable filters and an isolated AD.
My experience with transformers (magnetic) and power supplies is a result of designing about a dozen switching supplies for the telecom industry. The work included pioneering contributions in load sharing supplies and early work in low dropout regulator ICs.
All of the above prepared me for my work as a designer of AD and DA converters. My designs include an array of AD and DA converters for instrumentation, medical and telecom industries (HP, ITT, ATT, GE, Siemens and more).
With much background in conversion, and much love for music, I became involved early in the dawn of digital audio. My first design was an early 16 bit stereo ADC and 18 bit DAC. These early products designed for Analog Solutions were sold to companies such as Ampex, Otari, New England Digital and more. One of my designs was taken from Analog Solutions by Dick Powers when the audio division was closed. He started a company called Ultra Analog that manufactured my DAC module under the name DAC D20400. This device was sold to OEMs Wadia, Pacific Microsonics, Mark Levinson and others.
I started looking into various types of dither during design of a stand alone AD box for Dorian Recording – a design collaboration with Vince Capizzo. Vince designed the digital section, and I supplied the AD. At that time, Apogee Electronics was a filters only manufacturer, and we used them in the front end. Another project with Vince, utilizing Apogee supplied filters (designed by Christof Heidelberg), was a design of a multi channel DA system for the first digital sound on film system Kodak Cinema Digital Sound.
Bruce Jackson of Apogee Electronics became aware of the fact that the new over sampling and up sampling concepts would soon make their filters obsolete so I agreed to join them as a partner and steer them into the conversion business. I also agreed to include my share of an ongoing dither research as part of the deal. I designed the electronics for the first Apogee AD-500 and DA1000 and contributed nearly 2 years into the dither project.
Since 1993, I have been designing conversion equipment for my own company. The company name (dB Technologies), was changed in 2002 to Lavry Engineering. I make ADCs, DACs, MicPres, sample rate converters, and more. Since founding my company, I have developed a much improved dither based upon an entirely new and more modern technological concept – my αβC (αcoustic βit Correction™). My products incorporate many proprietary and innovative features, ranging from αcoustic βit Correction™ (the best dither) to CrystalLock™ (the best jitter reduction), to ground breaking performance and unique architecture and circuitry.
My gold series converters are used used by many major mastering and recording facilities and engineers around the world. My modular blue series units are configurable and allow access to high quality multi-channel conversion and pre-amplification. My black series makes quality stereo products accessible to larger number of users.
-Dan Lavry
