One engineer’s company, under two names.

A common shorthand gets Lavry’s history slightly wrong. dB Technologies was not a company Dan Lavry left; it was the first name of his own. The company says Lavry Engineering “was founded in 1993 as dB Technologies” and that “the name was changed in 2002”; its list of discontinued products still carries the line “formerly dB Technologies.” (It has no link to dBTechnologies, the Italian live-sound loudspeaker brand.) The company gives its home as Kingston, Washington, on Puget Sound; Tape Op, interviewing Lavry in March 2008, called it “Seattle-based.” Its legal name in its manuals is Lavry Engineering, Inc., and the brand is, as the company puts it, “widely known simply as ‘Lavry’.”

Dan Lavry came to audio from other kinds of measurement. In his own account on the company’s website, he spent the 1970s and early 1980s designing circuits for telephone traffic measurement, test systems, timing instruments and medical front-end amplifiers, and converters for companies including HP, AT&T, GE and Siemens. He told Tape Op that until the mid-1980s he designed converters for early MRI machines, instruments and letter scales, and that he turned to audio because “I’m a musician and I play music every day.”

His early audio work reached other brands. Sound On Sound wrote in 2012 that Lavry “developed the state-of-the-art converters employed in products from companies like Otari, New England Digital, Wadia, Pacific Microsonics, Mark Levinson,” and that before starting his own business he “played a pivotal role in moving Apogee from manufacturing only sophisticated analogue brick-wall filters into developing complete converter systems.” Lavry himself says he joined Apogee as a partner and designed the electronics for its first AD-500 and DA1000; English Wikipedia dates Apogee’s first outboard converters to 1991 but does not name him.

Gold, blue and black — and a case against 192 kHz.

Lavry built its range around three colours. Sound On Sound described them in 2012: the flagship models are gold, the blue products “offer configurable modularity,” and the black units “provide the most cost-effective entry to the marque.” The gold line included the AD122 analogue-to-digital converters and the DA924 digital-to-analogue converter; the blue line, modular multichannel units such as the LavryBlue 4496, which a Tape Op writer was already comparing against other converters in 2007; the black line, compact stereo units such as the DA10, DA11 and AD11. Lavry says its converters rely on its own dither, which it calls Acoustic Bit Correction, and its CrystalLock jitter reduction.

The company’s philosophy is the opposite of a “coloured” converter. It says electronics in a signal chain should add “no sonic colorations or other such distortions unless the distortions are an optional artistic decision.” Sound On Sound’s Hugh Robjohns wrote that Lavry’s designs “have a very strong engineering emphasis,” drawn from fields where “only hard measurable data and real-world objective verification is acceptable.” Reviewing the AD11 converter and mic preamp in June 2012, he called it “a very high-quality stereo A-D converter,” though he found its interface “frustratingly slow to use in some situations.”

Lavry is also known for what it publishes. The company offers white papers on sampling, jitter and filters and invites readers to cite them, and English Wikipedia does: its article on sampling cites Dan Lavry’s 2012 paper The Optimal Sample Rate for Quality Audio, which argues that about 60 kHz would be closer to ideal and that 88.2 or 96 kHz are the closest standard rates. That view showed in the products: the AD11 stopped at 96 kHz, and Robjohns wrote that Lavry “argues very convincingly” that higher rates harm timing accuracy.

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.

A smaller range, still trading.

Lavry is still in business, with a narrower range than in its gold-blue-black years. Its website lists two current products: the Savitr, model AD-24-200, a stereo analogue-to-digital converter offered in AUX and MWC versions, the latter with a master clock; and the Quintessence, a stereo reference digital-to-analogue converter and monitor controller. The company says the Savitr outperforms the AD122 series it replaces and that the Quintessence exceeds the DA924, which it says led the market for more than 16 years; we give both as its claims. Their manuals are dated 2021 and 2022.

Older models are listed as discontinued, among them the AD122 family, the DA10, DA11 and DA924, and the company says repairs for the AD122 series have ended because it “can no longer acquire or manufacture parts.” Its website was still being updated in 2026, and its dealer list runs from the United States to Europe, Japan and Australia. We found no sale or outside owner in the sources we checked, and no statement on where its products are made, so we make no claim either way; Sound On Sound simply called it an American manufacturer.

For a design guide, Lavry shows a brand that rests on one engineer’s name and an argument for accuracy, organised by colour rather than by logo. Compare Apogee Electronics, which Lavry helped move into converters, and Benchmark Media Systems, another maker that sells on measured transparency. For this guide we use deep blue, gold and black with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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