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Einstein is located in Bochum, a city of 400,000 inhabitants along the river Ruhr of Germany's industrial Ruhrgebiet corridor and inside the Dortmund/Duisburg/Düsseldorf triangle. While Einstein's final testing and shipping plant shares a building with the management of Bochum's Symphony, the above ladies are not professional operatic performers but party animals captured on camera during Matrix Bochum's 2003 New Year's disco bash.

When I commented to Brian about the lack of owner's manuals with my review loaners, he countered that Einstein thus far had purely concentrated on their domestic market - everything they can build seems pretty much sold by the time it's crated which reportedly already includes something on the order of 300 of the new preamps [below left]. An English site and English collateral materials should be ready by CES when Einstein will grab the bull that's the current US market by the pointy horns. Ackerman also divulged that Volker's a most avid wine collector who will bring some choice bottles to Las Vegas ready for those whose gullets are drying up in the arid desert airs.

For a brief company history, Volker submitted the following chart:
  • 1988: We started to design our first amplifier, an integrated solid-state amp called The Amp
  • 1990: We launched it to the public and received the first reviews here in Germany (only really nice ones of cause - hmm)
  • 1991/92: Other excellent reviews from England, Italy, France, Sweden, Taiwan, Japan and three awards from Japan for one of the best sounding integrated amplifiers (excellent ranking for three years in a row!)
  • 1994: New updated version of The Amp
  • 1995: We launched our first CD Player The CD and got nice feedback from the reviewers, again
  • 1996: We stopped manufacturing The Amp ( we sold about 2300 of them over time)
  • 1997: We stopped manufacturing The CD and started to design The Tube preamplifier
  • 1998: We started to design The Last Record Player, another tube-based product
  • 1999: We launched both products in the market and again, received nice comments from a lot of people (at that time, some reviewers here in Germany advised me not to design tube products because there was no future in the modern world for tubes. Really! They told me that we would soon go bankrupt. Today these same people really like to review our tube products and a lot of other manufactures are now selling and manufacturing tube components. I think tube equipment is the only product which is selling nicely over here.)
  • 1999: We started to design our OTL monoblocks The Final Cut in 23- and 60-watt versions
  • 2001: We launched the Final Cut amps to the public and began design work on the integrated amp The Absolute Tune
  • 2002: We updated The Last Record Player, launched The Absolute Tune to the public and started to design The Light In The Dark stereo amplifier
  • 2003: We started to design The Turntable's Choice MC phono amplifier
  • 2004: USA
  • 2005: We will launch The Light In The Dark and The Turntable's Choice

Before I return the mike to Volker, does it strike anyone else as remarkable that this firm tends to take two years from commencement of design work to final introduction of a product to the public? This suggests the opposite of using the first generation of buyers as unwitting beta testers. Very commendable, that - especially with tube gear. Back to Volker:

"In the beginning, we also experimented with speaker designs but fortunately noticed very soon that we didn't possess the proper equipment (beside our ears) to seriously design speakers. So we never touched speaker design and manufacture again and have no plans to do so in the future. At the moment, we spend all of our time and resources to design and manufacture our tube-based product line. We also have designed "nice" cables but they are only as good as other good cables.


When we started to sell our first tube components in 1999, our products were only available in the German-speaking part of the world - Austria, Switzerland and Germany. Due to our strong home market buying up everything we could produce, we never succeeded in selling our product abroad. Although we manufacture a good quantity, we were always too tight in production to go overseas. (For example, we have sold over 300 pieces of our preamp The Tube -- price class of ca. $12,000 -- in Germany alone).


This year we decided to start selling some of our product to the USA. We had some earlier requests but when we met Brian Ackerman, we knew that he was the right person to handle our product. Next year we hope to take it a step further and begin distribution in Japan again. But first, we'll try to do a good job of it in the US!


We currently employ eight people in our company. There's our designer Mr. Rolf Weiler and my wife Mrs. Annette Heiss, an interior designer who is responsible for our aesthetics. Then there are three engineers, one salesman, one book keeper (my mother of course) and myself. I am responsible for the nicer things in life - listening to music, quality control and friendly contacts. My father is "employed" too, of course. He's everybody's darling. What a job!


Our intention to HiFi manufacture is very old-fashioned and similar -- I hope -- to a lot of other audio manufacturers in the world. We really love listening to music and have noticed that you need some quality tools for that. So we try to manufacture some of the best tools to listen to music in a serious fashion. But, I have to admit, we also need to earn some money to manufacture these tools and be in a good mood to develop sophisticated designs. We don't like to be a "copy shop". So we try hard to realize our own ideas if they make sense, regardless of whether it's a transistor or tube design. If you can take the benefits from both, excellent. At the end of the day and if money doesn't matter, we believe that you will have the very best in listening to music if you go for a sophisticated tube design.


Because we are living in that part of Germany which was responsible for the coal and steel supply (the Ruhr Gebiet), we are based out of an old coal-mine building, which is really very nice and quite traditional, a strong building with a good atmosphere in which it is lovely to work."


So there you have it, the background on the other Einstein who wanted to return a plumber but got sidetracked by HiFi.