A Nagra engineer, a video idea and a workstation.

Merging Technologies was founded in Switzerland in 1990, in the Lavaux wine villages above Lake Geneva, east of Lausanne. The company’s own history says it was started in Chexbres by Claude Cellier, an electronics graduate of the Lausanne institute of technology, who had spent about ten years at Nagra Kudelski, the Swiss maker of portable tape recorders. There, the company says, he held marketing, engineering and management posts and played “a pivotal role” in developing the Nagra T and Nagra IV-S TC recorders.

English Wikipedia tells the start differently. It names the town as Puidoux, the neighbouring commune where the company has been based, and lists four founders: Cellier, Jean-Marc Porchet, Dominique Brulhart and Markus Erne. We give both versions. Brulhart was later named on the company’s website as its head of software engineering.

The first goal was not audio. The company says Cellier’s first project was an “all-in-one” video system for Commodore Amiga users, and English Wikipedia says the plan was to build a digital audio workstation quickly and then move on to video editing. Instead the workstation took over. It became Pyramix, the recording, editing and mastering software that remains the company’s best-known product, and the company says it was among the first able to record DSD, the one-bit format used on Super Audio CD.

That work produced Merging’s main technical legacy. DSD is hard to edit, so Merging and Philips developed DXD, or Digital eXtreme Definition: a 24-bit PCM format sampled at 352.8 kHz, eight times the CD rate, for mastering SACD releases. English Wikipedia, citing the trade magazine Resolution, says DXD was introduced with Pyramix and the Sphynx 2 converter in 2004. The company says “the bulk” of the DSD and DXD downloads sold by specialist sites were recorded on its systems, a claim we report rather than confirm.

Horus, Hapi, Anubis — and a hi-fi label.

From 2012 Merging moved its hardware onto computer networks. The company says it introduced its first RAVENNA interface that year: Horus, a rack-mounted converter that carries audio over Ethernet instead of dedicated cables. A smaller modular unit, Hapi, followed; Sound On Sound reviewed it in March 2015. Both were made compatible with AES67, the open standard for audio over IP, and the company added ANEMAN, software for managing such networks across brands. In 2019 came Anubis, a compact desktop interface. Reviewing it in May 2020, Sound On Sound’s Hugh Robjohns called Merging a maker “highly regarded in professional circles” and Anubis “a new and significantly more affordable product.” Its show-control software, Ovation, started in a theme park, the company says, and now runs playback in museums, opera houses and arenas.

The product names form a system. Pyramix, Sphynx, Horus, Hapi, Anubis and the Mykerinos processing card all point to ancient Egypt — Sound On Sound noted that Anubis is “named after the ancient Egyptian God of the dead” — and the company’s old website used a small pyramid as a section marker.

In 2015 Merging took the same converter technology into home hi-fi. It announced the NADAC, short for “Network Attached DAC,” for the High End show, then held in Munich, in May 2015, in stereo and eight-channel versions with an ESS Sabre converter chip and a RAVENNA Ethernet input, audioXpress reported. The home products were sold under a separate MERGING+ label with its own website: the MERGING+NADAC, the MERGING+PLAYER, which the company described as a Roon-enabled NADAC, the MERGING+POWER supply and the MERGING+CLOCK. English Wikipedia now lists the NADAC as discontinued; we did not find a dated announcement.

Digital makers and the record.

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.

From Sennheiser to Neumann.

In July 2022 the German audio company Sennheiser, which had sold its consumer business to concentrate on professional audio, announced that it had bought Merging Technologies, audioXpress reported on 5 July; that report gave no price. Merging’s team of about 20 was to stay in Puidoux and work closely with Neumann, Sennheiser’s Berlin microphone and monitor brand. Cellier, described as founder and chief executive, called the two companies “a perfect match.” The first joint product was to be a Neumann-branded interface based on Anubis.

The Merging name is now being retired. On 30 June 2026 the company announced that “Merging Technologies becomes Neumann.” After four years of integration in product development, production, sales and support, it said, the Merging corporate brand would be phased out, while Pyramix, Ovation, Anubis and Hapi Mk III would carry on in the Neumann range, developed, made and supported by the same teams; the announcement groups Anubis, Hapi Mk III and Neumann’s MT 48 as one family of interfaces. The old website now says it is “being phased out” and sends visitors to Neumann’s. That site described the products as “Swiss-made,” which we report as the company’s claim.

For a design guide, Merging shows how a small engineering company can build a coherent identity from names rather than pictures, and how that identity can be absorbed into a larger brand. Compare RME, another maker of studio interfaces, and Mytek, a studio-converter maker that also sells to hi-fi listeners. For this guide we use slate blue, ink and a signal orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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