Audio Alchemy

Audio Alchemy was a high fidelity audio equipment manufacturer based in California, USA. It produced many lines of relatively affordable audio products, including CD players, transports, digital audio processors, and amplifiers. They have since gone out of business, the primary engineers moving on to found Channel Islands Audio and (now defunct) Perpetual Technologies. Audio Alchemy products made 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 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 is introduced. Perpetual Technologies and Camelot Technology also produce products that use the I²S interface. Several members of the original Audio Alchemy team, including Peter Madnick, Audio Alchemy's co-founder, have formed Alchemy².