Four veterans and a Minnesota start-up.

Exogal was a small American maker of digital-to-analogue converters and amplifiers, based in Eagan, Minnesota, near Minneapolis–St Paul. Its own website, as preserved by the Internet Archive, said it was founded in 2013 by four “audio industry veterans” — Jim Kinne, Larry Jacoby, Jeff Haagenstad and Jan Larsen — and explained the name as “Exo (out of…) + gal (galaxy),” for products meant to be “out of this galaxy.” A photo caption on the site gave their roles: Haagenstad as chief executive, Kinne as chief technology officer, Jacoby as vice president of manufacturing engineering and Larsen as chief operating officer; three of them were photographed at the 2014 Rocky Mountain Audio Fest in Denver. Early on the site also advertised for “brilliant software, electronics and mechanical engineers.”

The Wadia connection is real, but sources describe it in different ways. Exogal said Kinne had designed the Wadia 27 decoding computer, the Wadia 270 CD transport and the Wadia 790 Power DAC, calling him “the technical heart and soul of EXOGAL.” Reviewing the Comet in October 2015, Dagogo’s Douglas Schroeder wrote that the four principals had “migrated from Wadia” after it was absorbed by the Fine Sounds Group, which English Wikipedia says bought Wadia in 2011. Hi-Fi+ went further in 2019, calling Kinne and Jacoby founders of Wadia. Wadia’s own 2008 history names no individuals; it says the company was founded in 1988 by “a team of engineers from the Minneapolis based 3M Corporation.” So we give the founder description as Hi-Fi+’s, not as settled fact.

Schroeder was impressed by the launch itself, writing that the Comet looked “more like an offering from a company in the game for decades rather than one established in 2013.”

Comet, Ion and the power DAC.

Exogal’s first product was the Comet, a compact DAC and preamplifier listed on its website by January 2014 as the “Comet Computer DAC,” alongside a remote and an “audio rendering platform.” Hi-Fi+ described a “billet machined case” with a headphone socket on one side and a reflective LCD that was “almost unreadable” but looked “cool.” The Comet took AES/EBU, coaxial, optical and USB inputs, played PCM up to 384kHz and DSD128, and could be controlled by remote or by an app over Bluetooth. A Comet Plus and a power-supply upgrade followed, along with a black finish.

The Ion PowerDAC was the more unusual design. Announced alongside the Comet, it took, Hi-Fi+ reported, “a further 18 months of ‘frying prototypes, speakers, and resistive loads,’” and grew from an idea that had “been simmering in Jim’s head for 25 years.” Exogal said it was neither Class D nor based on pulse-width modulation. Haagenstad told the magazine that both products used “multi-core FPGAs to implement custom math processors.” When the two were paired, the Ion took the Comet’s signal over an HDMI link the company called Exonet, handled volume itself and converted to analogue only at full power. It was rated at 100 watts per channel into eight ohms.

The press was largely positive. Hi-Fi+, which reviewed the pair at £2,950 for the Comet with its power-supply upgrade and £3,350 for the Ion, said few pre-amp, DAC and power-amp combinations would beat them. At Capital AudioFest in 2019, Stereophile’s Herb Reichert listened to a system using a $3,500 Comet and the Ion. Exogal’s 2015 website listed dealers in the United States, Europe, Australia, South Africa and across Asia, and its 2019 site added “Vortex” streaming hubs.

Digital makers and documentation.

The seven makers in this round all build digital audio — converters, streamers and music servers — in seven different countries.

Rockna’s website names its company as Rockna Electronics, in Suceava, in northern Romania. Totaldac was created by Vincent Brient, whose website gives its premises as near Rennes, in western France, and says that all its products are designed and manufactured in France.

Merging Technologies was founded in Puidoux, in the Swiss canton of Vaud, in 1990, according to English Wikipedia, which records its acquisition by Sennheiser in 2022; its own website now says it is part of Neumann. Antipodes Audio is a New Zealand company, Antipodes Audio Limited, whose website gives an address in Ōtaki, north of Wellington.

Pink Faun is based in Wageningen, in the Netherlands; its website names Jord Groen as its owner and says its products are handcrafted in the Netherlands. Exogal is American: its archived website, as captured in 2021, said it was founded in 2013 and that its products were designed, sourced and manufactured in Minnesota. The bare exogal.com address now shows unrelated content, so we rely on the archived pages.

Gustard is Chinese: its website gives its full name as Shenzhen Gustard Technology and says it is headquartered in Shenzhen, in Guangdong province, where it says it designs, builds and tests its products.

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.

Made in Minnesota, then quiet.

Exogal made a point of where it built things. Its website said its products were “designed, sourced and manufactured in Minnesota,” using “state of the art mechanical design tools integrated with the latest in milling and finishing technology,” and that keeping manufacturing “close to home” shortened development time; we give those as the company’s claims. In January 2021 it announced an office in the European Union, Exogal-Europe GmbH in Ladenburg, Germany. By May 2021 it was running a web store at exogalaudio.com, selling the Pulsar, a remote that added infrared control to the Comet and Ion, under the line “We do the math for you! All you need to do is listen!”

After that the record thins out. The last Internet Archive captures of the store date from early 2022; by March 2024 the exogalaudio.com domain was listed for sale, and neither it nor the European domain resolved when we checked in October 2026. We found no announcement that the company had closed or been sold, so we say only that it appears to have gone quiet. There is also a domain trap: exogal.com, the original address, was archived in March 2026 as an unrelated Indonesian online-gambling blog and is not a source for the brand.

For a design guide, Exogal shows how a name can carry a whole identity: a space metaphor, products called Comet, Ion and Pulsar, and machined metal cases. Compare Chord Electronics, another maker of FPGA-based DACs, and MSB Technology, an American DAC maker. For this guide we use deep-space navy, silver and a comet blue with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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