Linea Research was formed in 2003 by Davey Smalley, Ben Ver, Pip Wilson, and Paul Williams, all of whom had worked together previously in the professional audio industry. Their aim was to design, develop and market innovative professional audio equipment. Having spent much time doing basic research and developing critical pieces of technology, the company produced its first product, the X-Pod Class-D amplifier with an integrated switched-mode power supply and DSP. Success followed, and to this day the X-Pod product line is being adopted by some very prestigious clients who have collectively now deployed thousands of these units. Since then the range of amplifiers, DSP, network, and software products have greatly expanded, culminating in the groundbreaking M and C series of processed amplifiers and the ASC48 system controller.
Expertise and Philosophy
With extensive experience in audio engineering and the associated key technologies Linea Research are in a unique position. The integration of Switched-Mode Power Supplies, very high power sonically transparent Class D amplifiers, networked Digital Signal Processing, and the associated control software are all non-trivial and are all areas in which they excel. These are the demanding technologies increasingly needed in modern audio systems, and Linea are able to offer them all.
Every aspect of a Linea product; be that hardware, software or DSP algorithm creation is produced by Linea’s team; they do not out-source any development work. They do this to attain the highest performance in an efficient cost-effective package that requires all parts of the system to operate sympathetically together. Linea branded products offer the industry’s best combination of features and performance.
World Class Manufacturing
Having world leading technology is not enough. The staff at Linea Research also have decades of combined experience in design and manufacturing. This has resulted in the adoption of an approach that leads to very high factory gate quality. Critical to this is ‘design for manufacture’, which yields increased assembly accuracy, robust test regimes, reduced assembly time and high quality in general.
Every sub-assembly is serialised, and logged against the final product it is used in. As any changes to a sub-assembly automatically cause a change in its serial number, we are easily able to determine the exact build standard of any product. Since Linea Research products have been designed to be largely modular, they are able to test every sub-assembly individually prior to testing the finished unit. Each product is therefore effectively tested twice. This philosophy pays dividends in terms of their proven field quality. Naturally, before shipping every single unit is soak tested and safety tested prior to leaving their factory.
