An engineer’s second job.

Totaldac is the company of Vincent Brient, a French engineer. It is based in Brittany, between Rennes and Mont-Saint-Michel, about three hours by car from Paris, according to its website, which says: “Totaldac has been created by Vincent Brient in France not far from the Mont Saint-Michel.” SoundStage! Australia, in reviews published in 2021 and 2023, described him as the company’s founder and its chief designer or chief engineer.

It began as a sideline. In September 2010 — the earliest copy of its website in the Internet Archive — a French page introduced TOTALDAC as a micro-enterprise run under France’s auto-entrepreneur scheme: “My name is Vincent Brient and selling DACs is my secondary professional activity,” it said, in our translation. He described himself as a Supélec-trained engineer who had worked for ten years in telecommunications, on radio and audio products for harsh environments such as railways and cars. An English page from 2011 called Totaldac “a French single person company owned by me.” SoundStage! Australia later summarised that background as “extensive digital design experience derived from the telecommunication electronics industry.”

The launch date depends on the source. The archived website already had a price page for its DAC boards in October 2010; the Polish reviewer Dawid Grzyb of HifiKnights, in a February 2025 review republished by 6moons, wrote that “this brand launched in 2011.” We give both. The same review called Brient an engineer “with over a decade in the IT sector,” a description that differs from his own account of telecommunications work.

Resistors, counted.

Brient’s “origin of the project” page of 2010 said he had spent more than ten years working on DACs and digital crossovers “using CPLD, DSP and FPGA for a private use only,” and that “because I had some demands I decided to produce and sell this DAC-crossover.” The first products were sold partly as bare circuit boards for builders’ own enclosures — a stereo DAC board and two- and three-way digital crossover boards for active loudspeakers — alongside a ready-to-use DAC, the REFERENCE-A1. By 2012 a REFERENCE-D1 had followed, with a USB input and a remote-controlled volume.

The core technology has not changed. Totaldac DACs use a discrete R2R ladder — a network of resistors that turns binary data into stepped voltages — rather than a converter chip. The 2012 D1 used “VishayPG foil naked (VAR) 0.01% resistors, 100 resistors per stereo channel,” its page said, and the number of these Vishay bulk-metal-foil resistors still separates the models: 100 in the d1-core and d1-unity, 200 in the d1-biunity, 300 in the d1-triunity and 600 in the four-box d1-sublime, according to HifiKnights. The DACs work without oversampling, with a switchable filter, which the company calls “Treble FIR,” to correct the slight treble loss that brings.

Models have come and gone. In March 2021 Part-Time Audiophile reviewed the d1-tube-mk2 and SoundStage! Australia the d1-direct, which it called the company’s top single-box DAC at the time. The range was later rebuilt around what the company calls the “unity” architecture; Brient told SoundStage! Australia in 2023 that it “allows a better clock distribution, a lower jitter, a lower R2R power supply rail impedance and a lower noise in the digital section.” The range now also includes a streamer, a CD transport, an Ethernet switch, reclockers, the AMP-1-sublime amplifier and loudspeakers, among them the spherical Balloon. Prices are published: in 2026 the website lists the d1-core at €5,600 and the d1-sublime at €50,000, including VAT in Europe.

Design 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.

“Total digital to auditorium converter.”

Totaldac’s manufacturing claim is short: “All Totaldac products are also designed and manufactured in France.” In 2010 its website said its boards were assembled in France in a factory certified to the ISO 9001 quality standard, and that Brient checked and listened to each one before shipping. SoundStage! Australia wrote in 2021 that, apart from specialist work such as surface-mount assembly and aluminium machining, which is sourced locally, the products are “entirely handcrafted by Vincent Brient and manufactured in France.” We found no independent account of the workshop beyond those.

The company explains its name with a slogan, “total digital to auditorium converter,” and sells directly as well as through dealers. Visitors can listen at its headquarters, in a room of about 60 square metres, and owners can move up the range for the list-price difference plus €350 a box. Its website, plain HTML with a full price list, is part of the brand: Grzyb called it “clean, factual, stripped clean of marketing fluff.” The home page carries a long list of press quotations, from Stereophile to Diapason, which we have not checked one by one. The name itself appears as TOTALDAC, Totaldac and, in the press, TotalDAC. We found no published brand guidelines or official colours.

For a design guide, Totaldac shows how a one-person company can make its engineering, its prices and its founder the whole of its identity. Compare Rockna, the Romanian maker of FPGA-driven ladder DACs, and MSB Technology, the California ladder-DAC maker. For this guide we use granite, tide grey and a foil copper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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