From LaserDisc upgrades in the redwoods.

MSB Technology is older than its current reputation suggests. Its website in 1998, preserved by the Internet Archive, said MSB Technology Corporation was “founded in 1985 and incorporated in 1989” and was “located in the Redwoods of Northern California,” at La Honda, a small community that a later version of the page placed “between Silicon Valley and the coast.” A 2006 history page gave the founding year as 1986 instead, with the same 1989 incorporation, so we give both. That page shows a photograph captioned “Original Founders Mark (left) and Larry (right)” and is signed by Larry S. Gullman, general manager; it does not give Mark’s surname, and we could not find it.

In the 1990s MSB was as much a home-theatre company as a hi-fi one. Its 1998 page described two businesses: high-end audio components sold under the MSB name, and contract research and product development for other companies, some of it “manufactured and sold in volume for clients such as Runco International.” It said its staff had worked at Dolby, Ampex, RCA and SRI International, and listed upgrades that added AC-3 and DTS sound to LaserDisc players, receivers and processors. The 2006 page claimed a string of firsts, among them the first THX-approved LaserDisc player, the first outboard DTS processor and the first mass-marketed 24-bit/96kHz DAC, the Link DAC; these are the company’s claims. In 2000 it was also offering progressive-scan video upgrades for DVD players.

The Link DAC was the product that reached the hi-fi press. Stereophile’s Kalman Rubinson reviewed it in January 1999, writing that “the Link redefines entry into high-quality digital sound,” and followed it with a review of the Link DAC III in September 2000.

Platinum, Diamond and the ladder.

From the 2000s MSB concentrated on high-end digital: CD transports, its Platinum line and DACs built around its own discrete ladder converters rather than bought-in chips. The 2006 history page claimed the first discrete sign-magnitude ladder DAC, the Platinum DAC, and the first 80-bit DSP digital filter, in the Platinum DAC III, and said the company kept its “sales and advertising costs under 1% of sales.” It called MSB “one of the few audio companies who do our own design in-house and in the USA.”

Prices and ambitions rose. At CES in 2012 Stereophile’s Jon Iverson saw the Diamond DAC IV, which he put at roughly $20,000–35,000 depending on options; a year later he gave MSB his “award for most interesting new chassis design” for The Analog DAC, “a single low-slung curvy slab of aluminum with pockets sliced out of the bottom for the electronics,” from $7,000. In December 2018 The Absolute Sound’s Jonathan Valin reviewed the Reference DAC, from $39,500, and the $18,500 Reference Transport, writing that MSB had been making its own high-precision ladder DACs for 19 years and now used a “hybrid” ladder that switches between PCM and DSD.

The modern range is modular, with plug-in digital input and output modules. The company announced the Premier and Discrete DACs in January 2018, stereo and mono power amplifiers from 2019, and in June 2021 said it would stop making CD transports — a big step, it wrote, because “our company was founded on the first wave of CD Technology.” Its flagship Cascade DAC was announced in May 2024, followed by the Sentinel in July 2025 and the Palisade, a two-box “distilled” Cascade for digital sources only, in June 2026. MSB says the Cascade received Audio Art magazine’s “Best Performance of the Year” award.

Digital and streaming makers.

The makers in this guide work on the digital side of hi-fi and studio audio: the converters that turn digital files into an analogue signal, the network players that stream them and the servers that store them.

Two came from the studio. RME’s interfaces and converters are published by Audio AG of Haimhausen, Germany, and its manuals name IMM electronics of Mittweida, in Saxony, as the manufacturer. Bricasti Design, founded by two former Lexicon staff, makes reverbs and converters in Shirley, Massachusetts, it says.

Three are in Hong Kong and mainland China. Lumin is a brand of Pixel Magic Systems, whose address is in the Hong Kong Science Park at Sha Tin; Hi-Fi News lists the maker as Pixel Magic Systems, Hong Kong. Auralic’s Chinese website describes research centres in Beijing and Hangzhou. Holo Audio, founded by Jeff Zhu according to its US distributor, is listed as Chinese by 6moons, though the websites we checked give no city.

The other two are in Portugal and the US. Innuos, a music-server maker that began in London in 2009, now gives its headquarters as Faro, in Portugal’s Algarve, with a sales office in England. MSB Technology, which its 1998 website said was founded in 1985, has its factory in Watsonville, California, and says its development and manufacturing are done in California.

Where the products are made varies more: some makers name a factory, some describe their own workshops, and some say little.

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 new generation in Watsonville.

The company has moved south along the coast. By December 2006 its contact page gave an address in Aptos, and its history page described a home “right on Monterey Bay in a beautiful and exotic bamboo grove”; by 2020 its factory was in Watsonville, in Santa Cruz County. In 2022 MSB wrote that it had bought its manufacturing building two years earlier and covered the roof with a 69-kilowatt solar array that it said supplies about 90% of its power. Its website describes the company as “located in Silicon Valley,” while its factory address is in Watsonville, on Monterey Bay.

Today the website names Jonathan and Daniel Gullman as the owners of MSB and calls them brothers. A 2025 post introducing a refreshed brand identity said the launch of the Cascade “signaled a new generation of ownership,” described the company as “a once-in-a-lifetime collaboration of family and friends,” and explained that the DAC was named after California’s Cascade Range. We could not find an independent source for the change of ownership or for the owners’ relationship to Larry Gullman. On manufacturing, MSB says it does “California based in-house development and manufacturing,” with its own CNC machine shop, circuit-board shop and production floor, and in January 2025 it posted a factory tour filmed by the Audiophile Foundation. We give those as the company’s claims.

For a design guide, MSB Technology shows how a maker can let machined aluminium and a modular architecture carry the brand, and how a long-running company can refresh its identity around a place. Compare dCS, another maker of its own discrete converters, and Chord Electronics, which also avoids off-the-shelf DAC chips. For this guide we use graphite, machined silver and a pine green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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