A drummer’s studio and a mastering engineer’s workshop.

Dangerous Music was a recording studio before it was an equipment brand. According to the company, Bob Muller came to New York in 1985 as a drummer and producer looking for freelance work, put together what he calls several “illegal basement 8-track studios,” and in 1992 opened a studio named Dangerous Music, built around a vintage Neve console and a Studer multitrack tape machine, with a live room, a grand piano and a Hammond organ.

His partner came from mastering. The company’s history says Chris Muth built a mastering room at The Hit Factory in 1987 to the specifications of the engineer Jack Skinner, joined Sterling Sound in 1990 — working with mastering engineers including Ted Jensen, George Marino and Greg Calbi — and modified and then designed custom equipment for its rooms. After a period at Masterdisk he started Muth Audio Design in 1995, and from 1998 to 2003 he returned to Sterling as technical director, overseeing its new 14-room facility in Chelsea. Muth came to Muller’s studio for a session in the mid-1990s, and the two became friends and partners.

The product grew out of the studio’s own problem. As clients moved from tape and consoles to mixing inside computers, Muller and Muth built a 2-BUS, an analog summing amplifier that takes separate outputs from a digital audio workstation and mixes them in analog circuitry, as a custom one-off for New York engineers who had recorded at the studio but mixed elsewhere. Word spread, and in 2001, the company says, the two started Dangerous Music Inc and began selling the 2-BUS commercially. Muth became its full-time designer in 2003.

Summing, monitoring and the hybrid studio.

The company describes its purpose as solving the problems of the “hybrid studio,” where engineers record and edit in software but still want analog headroom, hardware monitor control and outboard processors. Its own product timeline shows how the range built up around that idea: the MONITOR and 2-BUS LT in 2002; the MASTER, a mastering insert and routing unit, in 2004; the MONITOR ST and SR stereo and surround monitor controllers in 2005; the D-BOX, combining summing and monitoring, in 2006; the LIAISON insert switcher in 2011; and the SOURCE portable monitor controller in 2012.

Signal processors came later. The BAX EQ of 2010 uses the broad bass and treble shelving curves associated with the British engineer Peter Baxandall, familiar from the tone controls on hi-fi amplifiers; the company calls it the first professional stand-alone equaliser to use them, a claim we give as its own. A stereo COMPRESSOR followed in 2013, announced at that year’s AES convention in New York after more than two years’ development, Sound On Sound reported. Converters came in 2015 with the CONVERT-2 and CONVERT-8, and in 2017 with the CONVERT-AD+, which, Sound On Sound noted, offers optional transformers from the Canadian maker Hammond, chosen by Muth after listening tests.

Newer models replace older ones rather than starting again: the 2-BUS+ in 2015, the D-BOX+ in 2019 and the 16-channel 2-BUS-XT in 2023, which Sound On Sound said benefited from smaller components and six-layer circuit boards. The design philosophy is consistent. “We are of a mind that the summing or the monitoring paths should not be colored,” Muller says on the company website, which also quotes his motto, “Simple on the outside, complicated on the inside,” and “one button, one function.” In 2013 Sound On Sound’s Hugh Robjohns summed up the credo as audio integrity being “non-negotiable.”

Design and documentation.

Big consoles get the attention, but much of a modern studio’s signal path runs through equipment from smaller specialist makers. The seven companies in this guide each built a name in one link of that chain: summing, conversion between analogue and digital, microphone preamplifiers, or moving audio between systems.

Summing is where Dangerous Music began. The company says it was officially founded in 2001 with the release of its 2-BUS analogue summing amplifier. Its website gave an address in Edmeston, in upstate New York, in 2008 and 2014.

Conversion is central to several others. Lavry Engineering, whose range includes the Quintessence digital-to-analogue converter, gives its shipping address as Kingston, Washington. Crane Song, whose products have included HEDD converters, gave its address as Superior, Wisconsin, on its website in 2005. Burl Audio, which says it was founded in 2006, makes converters and microphone preamplifiers and describes itself as “based in Santa Cruz, California.”

Grace Design, a family firm that says it was founded by the brothers Michael and Eben Grace in the early 1990s, makes microphone preamplifiers and says its shop is in Lyons, Colorado. SPL electronics, which names Hermann Gier and Wolfgang Neumann as its founders, is based in Niederkrüchten, Germany, and uses the line “Sound Performance – Made in Germany.” DirectOut, from Mittweida in Saxony, works on the networking side, with MADI and audio-over-IP converters and routers that link consoles, stage racks and computers.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Still run by its founders.

Dangerous Music appears to have stayed in its founders’ hands; we found no record of a sale or investor in the sources we checked. The company’s privacy policy describes Dangerous Music, Inc. as “a corporation located in the State of New York,” and its website names Muller as president. In 2016 the site listed its US office in Edmeston, in upstate New York, far from the city studio where the business began, along with a European office, Dangerous Music Europe, in Germany; the current site gives a US phone line and the European office without a street location, so we cannot confirm where it is based today. The company does not say where its units are built on the pages we checked, though its FAQ refers to the labour of hand-wiring connectors on the 2-BUS.

The brand now extends into software. Its first BAX EQ plugin appeared in 2013, the company says, and in July 2026 it described a rebuilt version made with the Italian developer Acustica Audio and the mix engineer Luca Pretolesi, measured against production units of the hardware and approved under its Dangerous Music Digital label. Its slogan is “Sacrifice Nothing,” registered according to the website; a 2016 version of the site used the line “Audio Integrity: non-negotiable.”

For a design guide, Dangerous Music shows how a brand can grow from one room’s problem into a whole category, with plain, functional names — 2-BUS, MONITOR, CONVERT — that describe what each box does. Compare Solid State Logic, the console maker whose desks set the studio workflow that mixing in the computer disrupted, and Benchmark Media Systems, another upstate New York maker of converters and monitoring gear. For this guide we use rack black, a warning red and steel grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Dangerous Music’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.