A techno fan who built his own synthesizer.

Tiptop Audio is the Eurorack company of Gur Milstein, whom Sound On Sound introduced in November 2024 as its founder. “I probably came out of my mum’s womb with two SL1200MkII Technics turntables,” he told the magazine, adding that he was involved in “the beginning of the global techno movement” in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Analogue synthesizers were then expensive and hard to find, so he tried to build one, which led him to study electronic engineering; he then worked for an engineering company for two years.

“In 2008, I opened Tiptop Audio from a small flat in the Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles,” Milstein said. He described the motive as a reaction to the 1990s, when, he said, “we were horrified by the destruction MP3s and computers inflicted on the music industry and the collapse of nearly all synthesizer manufacturers.” The company’s website, launched in April 2008 according to archived copies, carried a copyright line reading 2007–2008, so some groundwork may predate the founder’s date; we follow his account. Archived copies of tiptopaudio.com from 2004 and 2005 show a parked domain offered for sale, not the company.

The first module was the Z5000, a digital effects module built around what the company called the Tiptop Audio 24-bit DSP, with 16 algorithms. The archived site shows it being sold through the US distributor Analogue Haven by April 2008; Sound On Sound later dated the original Z5000 to 2009, so sources differ. In July 2008 the company announced German distribution through Schneider’s Buero, under the slogan “Analog. Digital. Harmony.” The first batch of the Z3000 oscillator was being assembled in October 2008, the Z2040 low-pass filter followed in 2009, according to Sound On Sound, and the cartridge-based Z-DSP effects module arrived at the end of 2009 in a first run of 40, the company said at the time.

Cases, cables and Buchla designs.

Much of Tiptop Audio’s reach has come from the parts around the modules. Reviewing its ART range in November 2024, Sound On Sound wrote that “many a newcomer” owed their first rack and power supply to the Happy Ending Kit, “a uniquely affordable bare-bones power supply and rack set,” and credited the company with “a novel, now ubiquitous type of stackable patch cable” — its Stackcables. Synthtopia reported a Station 252 case in 2012 and the One sample player in 2017.

The team grew around Milstein. “A few years later, Chris Clepper and Piero Fragola joined,” he told Sound On Sound. The magazine’s reviews track the catalogue: the Forbidden Planet multimode filter at £105 in December 2018, the MISO utility module at £79 in 2019, and the ZVERB, ECHOZ and new Z5000 effects modules, at £179 each, in 2020. That review noted that many of their algorithms came from a library built up since the Z-DSP.

The most visible partnership is with Buchla. Tiptop’s website says Buchla “has teamed up with Tiptop Audio to resume the production of Don Buchla’s 200 series and convert it to Eurorack standards,” and lists models with a “t” suffix, such as the 248t Multiple Arbitrary Function Generator at $999. By March 2022 Synthtopia was describing “new” Tiptop Audio and Buchla modules that recreate 200 series designs from 1970, “designed to be mass-produced,” with prices starting around $160. Buchla U.S.A., which owns Don Buchla’s intellectual property, is a separate company, and none of the sources we checked says Tiptop owns it.

Design and documentation.

Eurorack is a modular synthesizer format that English Wikipedia says was originally specified in 1995 by Doepfer Musikelektronik, Dieter Döpfer’s company at Gräfelfing in Upper Bavaria; Doepfer’s own timeline dates the first A-100 modules to 1996, and the company now says it receives ready-built modules from outside manufacturers, doing only final testing in-house. Other makers began building to Doepfer’s published specification in the mid-2000s, and by 2022, Wikipedia says, citing ModularGrid, more than 600 manufacturers offered over 15,000 modules.

The seven makers in this guide span that history. Tiptop Audio, which Wikipedia lists among the format’s mid-2000s adopters, says it has “joined forces” with Buchla to resume production of the Buchla 200 series, and its founder, Gur Milstein, told Sound On Sound in 2024 that he had built a factory in Thailand that makes all its products. 4ms Company says Dan Green founded it as a pedal business near Chicago in 1996, began designing Eurorack modules in Austin in 2009 and moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2012.

Intellijel is Canadian — “made with love by robots in Canada,” its website says — and Sound On Sound credits it with its own widely adopted 1U format. Noise Engineering, owned by the husband-and-wife team Stephen McCaul and Kris Kaiser, says its products are “designed and built in Southern California.” XAOC Devices described its team in 2021 as based in the suburbs of Warsaw; its manuals say “Made in the European Union.”

Mutable Instruments, Émilie Gillet’s company, worked from a Paris workshop and had its modules made in Normandy, its website said, until it shut down in December 2022. In the sources we checked, we found no record of any of the others being sold to an outside owner.

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.

Started in Los Angeles, made in Thailand.

Tiptop Audio is often described as a Los Angeles maker, and that is where Milstein says it began. Production is another matter. “I decided that Tiptop should stand for its name,” he told Sound On Sound in 2024. “So, I built a synthesizer factory in Thailand and started producing all our products under one roof.” The company’s website gives no address, and its ART page says the Polytip jacks on its modules are “top-quality components made in Japan.” We found no record of an outside investor or acquisition; the company appears to remain Milstein’s, though we could not confirm its ownership from a registry.

Its newest project is ART, a name adapted from UART, the serial-data standard. Instead of a pitch voltage, which Milstein called “a poor choice for pitch control of oscillators” because it is so sensitive to electrical noise, ART sends note values as high-speed data, so that oscillators stay in tune and polyphonic modules can be driven from one patch cable. Multichannel Polytip cables carry the resulting voices. Milstein says the standard is “completely open and royalty-free for anyone to use,” and that “every oscillator or sequencer released these days without ART is a missed opportunity for a better Eurorack.” Sound On Sound called the range the company’s “most stridently bold” yet, listing the ATX1 oscillator at £199 and the Octopus interface at £299.

For a design guide, Tiptop Audio shows how a brand can be built on infrastructure as much as on sound. Compare Buchla, whose 200 series it has brought to Eurorack, and Make Noise, another early adopter of the format. For this guide we use panel black, faceplate white and a patch amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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