Bricasti Design
UNCOMPROMISED DESIGN
Bricasti Design is revered by the pro-audio industry for having one of the best sounding reverbs on the market, the M7 stereo reverb. This was made possible by adopting an out-of-the-box approach.
Released in 2007, the M7 stereo reverberation processor was Bricasti's first product, targeted for the professional recording and mastering markets. The clean-sheet-of-paper M7, which uses reverberation synthesis rather than convoluting from recorded impulse samples, has gained an enviable reputation as the "gold standard" of reverb generators from its remarkable digital conversion performance.
Bricasti is not a pure start up, as the principals were long time Lexicon employees, until Harman International's New England operations were closed down.
One co-founder is Brian Zolner, subsequently after a 20 year’s stretch at Lexicon, was still completely immersed in the development of a new DAC design.
He was to be joined with DSP-software engineer Casey Dowdell, and in 2004 Bricasti was born.
Bricasti writes all its own signal processing software, while contracting out certain aspects of hardware engineering to AeVee Labs, itself made up of former employees of Madrigal Labs (stewards of the Mark Levinson brand); Bricasti had access to considerable knowledge of professional and audiophile markets.
Following-up was the M1 DAC, which derives from the M7 stereo reverb processor, in that the latter processes in the analogue and digital domains; Zolner recalls: "We already had a good DAC in our reverb processor, but we wanted to find out how much better we could make it."
“Zolner recalls, “We already had a good DAC in our reverb processor, but we wanted to find out how much better we could make it.””
From the day it was launched, Bricasti's M1 DAC was conceptualised and designed not for the professional but for the audiophile market. Similarly following Benchmark's DAC’s footsteps (a product well respected for the price-to-performance ratio expanding from a pro-audio background), but with a no-engineering-compromises in mind; as they say, the rest is history.
Since then, more models such as the M12, M21 and M25 have been made available from the American firm, winning not only many awards in the process but gained sincere admiration from the professional to the enthusiast consumer alike.
