A short history of Halcro and the Candy man

[PRE-ROLL. Video call with Halcro's Peter Foster, Lance Hewitt, and Mike Kirkham. Inset Jez Ford for Australian Hi-Fi.]

AUSTRALIAN HI-FI (Jez): Good to see you all. All three together. Do you actually all live in the same house?

MIKE KIRKHAM (laughs): Yeah, you know, business hasn’t been good, so we’ve had to economise. Actually, I was just taking photos you’ll find useful. Lance has turned up with archives and clippings. I’ve never seen some of this, the design magazines and so on. I’ve taken photos to send you.

AHF: Fantastic. So in terms of the history, what are you keen to focus on? Primarily the modern Halcro, or the whole thing?

MK: I reckon the whole thing; it’s an interesting story, and sub-stories around the whole Minelab thing. For example at one point Minelab, while they still owned Halcro, donated a significant number of mine detectors to the Cambodian government after the Khmer Rouge pulled out. It probably resulted in saving tens of thousands of children’s lives.

AHF: So Minelab came first, yes? The Minelab detectors basically built the cash pot that made Halcro possible.

LANCE HEWITT: Well, gold prospecting was where the money came from. We made detectors that outperformed any other gold-prospecting detector on the market. So people would have to buy them if they wanted to get the gold. And the more people who have the detectors, gold becomes harder to find, so the technology improved and improved. And that’s where Minelab’s core business was, and then we went onto [commercial] mine detection afterwards, because it’s obviously a translatable technology.

Welcome, then, to a history of Halcro, the Australian company famous for creating “the best amplifier ever!”

We arranged an interview with modern Halcro’s three principals: Peter Foster, Lance Hewitt, and Mike Kirkham. We had a rough timeline to talk through, filling in stories as we went. But it soon emerged things might not be quite so linear...

And this was not unexpected, partly since Halcro’s prime mover, Mr Bruce Halcro Candy himself, was not on the call. Mr Candy doesn’t do calls. Indeed, somewhat incredibly, two of the three main players at Halcro have never met him, despite Candy still contributing to the modern company. He communicates only with Lance. And Lance might not the man to fill in all the Candy gaps.

AHF: So right at the beginning we’ve got Bruce Candy messing with amplifiers by the time he was 12 or 13 years old. He was born in Durban, South Africa, in 1952, so he was doing that in South Africa?

LANCE HEWITT: Yeah, I think so. I’m not quite sure when he came to Australia in terms of dates, but he definitely spent, you know, his formative years in South Africa.

AHF: And then he went to Cambridge.

LH: Yeah… to be honest, I’ve forgotten about all that....

MIKE KIRKHAM: He’s about 15 minutes away and he’s still designing products for us, but I’ve never met him. I saw some pictures of him today and before that I don’t think I even knew what he looked like. The only person he communicates with in the company is Lance, because they go back a long way. He still comes
up with amazing designs or ideas on pieces of paper and passes them to Lance and says, ‘here, go and build this’.

AHF: But wasn’t Bruce Candy living at the end of your road?

MK: And it’s not even a big road. It turns into a dirt road in the middle of nowhere and it’s just bizarre that we happened to find an old shed that we turned into a warehouse manufacturing space, and it turned out to be at the end of the street where the first amplifiers were made.

Bruce Halcro Candy

Reclusive as he may be, there are certain Bruce Candy legends which can’t be
omitted from any Halcro story – such as Candy famously telling Stereophile’s Jon Iverson in 2001 that “I can hear up to 23kHz in one ear and 21kHz in the other. And when I was younger, I could hear much higher frequencies than these.”

Perhaps as a result of these superpowers, he says he was “teased mercilessly” for sticking with valve amplifiers against the industry’s shift to transistors because he found that “transistor sound was ghastly; very harsh.”

Various reports add details. Candy was the son of a teacher and a university lecturer, and he took a science degree at Natal University, then an M.Sc., before earning PhDs in physics and applied mathematics in the UK, and subsequently teaching at universities in the UK, then France, and finally Australia in 1980, where he worked on microwave radar and satellite communications while teaching at a university.

Then his career took an unexpected turn. Because the one thing on which everyone agrees is that Candy is a genius in two particular regards. Firstly he has great ideas. But secondly he knows how to deliver those ideas in the real world.

And the great idea which came to him in Australia was a novel and highly effective method of metal detection. This led to the company Minelab and a wildly successful line in metal detectors right up to the present day. (If you watch the addictive Newfoundland treasure-hunting series The Curse of Oak Island, their star detectorist Gary Drayton has his ultimate go-to waterproof detector for high-resolution target discrimination and everyday artifact hunting… and it’s a Minelab CTX 3030.)

Minelab

Was Bruce Candy himself a detectorist or a gold hunter? Lance Hewitt thinks not.

“I don’t think he ever went out in the field, prospecting himself,” he says. “It was more the technical challenge, a technical issue, something to be solved. Bruce’s way of going about things is to go back to first principles, and then come up with his solutions. Smartest guy I’ve ever met.”

Candy’s ideas and circuits for metal detecting were becoming recognised as so effective that they were making rival products simply redundant. Its first release was in 1984, the Goldseekers 15000, with circuitry tailored to cancel out the heavy ground noise of Australian mineralised ground, and with a specific frequency tailored for gold. It worked brilliantly.

Lance joined Minelab after leaving the army, in 1986, although the original version of Minelab went under, returning in 1987 with the GT 16000, with the world’s first automatic ground-tracking metal detector, meaning the machine adjusted on the fly to changing soil conditions. In 1989 there was the Eureka Dual Ace, the world’s first twin-frequency detector, so you could flip a switch to distinguish between big gold deposits and smaller nuggets.

Then in 1996, perhaps Candy’s most significant breakthrough in detecting: multi-period sensing (MPS), extending the depth of detection, even in highly mineralised soil. It was MPS which really launched Minelab globally, leading to subsidiaries in the USA and Ireland, and new work for governments and militaries, including detectors which were able to find the firing pins even on buried plastic landmines, leading to the removal of more than 500,000 unexploded landmines in Cambodia.

By the turn of the millennium, Candy could claim that 26 countries had bought Adelaide-made Minelab detectors, and that Minelab was the only brand purchased by the United Nations for the previous three years.

THREE EXTRAORDINARY TECHNOLOGIES

“There was a guy from the Philippines who had some money, wanted to invest in some technologies,” explains Lance.

Bruce Candy was not short of ideas. Look up his patents, for example, and there are two which relate to an early method for line detection in tennis; his ‘Tennis Electronic Lines’ system used balls with embedded metallic particules to trigger thin coils buried beneath the tennis court lines; this idea predated Hawk-Eye by a decade or more.

But to the Philippines investor, Candy offered up three other ideas. The first of these was a high-powered ultrasonic cleaning method for which Candy had made a patent application in 1993, granted in 1996. This described “an apparatus and method for ultrasonic cleaning in which a transducer in a liquid bath is driven by electronic circuitry causing rapid change of frequency to limit development of high concentration for any significant period of time.”

Previous ultrasonic cleaners had used pulses of specific fixed frequencies to create the cavitation bubbles within a liquid that did the cleaning of anything immersed in it; such bubbles collapse very suddenly and powerfully, the energy pulsing through the liquid to achieve the cleaning result. But Candy noted that fixed frequencies created standing waves, and a better cleaning effect for any given power input was achieved by using continuous wave-swept frequency modulation instead.

“Back when the Formula One Grand Prix was in Adelaide, we were approached by Williams, I think it was, to find a way of cleaning their radiator; that was one application for it,” remembers Lance.

There were many more: Candy’s patent has since been cited by examiners of 78 other applications covering marine anti-fouling, ophthalmic drug delivery, fluid management in surgery, and even modern medical ultrasonic blades.

Candy’s other two ideas offered up to the original Philippines investor play more directly into the future of the amplifier company to come. First there was a switched-mode power supply, another patent granted in 1996, using two servo loops to improve the efficiency of switch-mode regulators when used with a linear regulator; Candy’s solution reduced the high noise content of the switch-mode regulator without the inherent inefficiencies of the linear regular.

The remarkable result seemed something which the team would easily be able to offer for sale or for licence to other power supply manufacturers.

“But no one wanted them,” Lance says, still sounding both surprised and slightly miffed. “It was an ego thing, like ‘we didn’t invent it, so we don’t want it’. Instead that switched mode power supply design ended up being the fundamental basis of the power supply used in the dm58 and dm68.”

The third of the original Extraordinary Technologies was the audio amplifier itself. While Candy had his early preference for valves, notably KT88s and EL34s, his idea here was to build a “solid-state amplifier that supersedes valve amplifiers” by using MOS-FETs and ways to reduce noise, gleaned from his experience in microwave communications and detectors.

“I just came up with the designs while riding my bicycle,” Candy later told a local reporter, adding that his interest in audio came from his grandfather who was in charge of the Royal Navy’s radio system for World War I. (The same article dubbed him the “Nutty Professor” of Basket Range, his rural town in the Adelaide Hills.)

“We made one amplifier,” says Lance. “It went to the Philippines, and I’ve never seen it again. But that was sort of the beginning of the dm58. We built prototypes of everything, ready to take them round, but then the guy from the Philippines lost interest for some reason we never really understood. So that all fell in a heap.”

Lance returned to work at Minelab, but “over the years we chatted about things, as you do, and it turned out he had found another source of capital to fund the amplifier. And I was, ‘Come on, let’s go do that’. Minelab was annoying me at the time; I felt I needed to do something else, so I went off and did that. I don’t know how much of an influence I had on him, but I certainly badgered him about it.”

The new money was coming from David Pope, who saw the potential in the technology. A new company was founded: Extraordinary Technology (Hi-Fi) Pty Ltd, trading as Halcro.

Development 1996-1999

According to Lance, the idea was to get the amplifier up and going, and then “to look at one of Bruce’s other brain waves, try to commercialise that. But we never got past the amplifier, really.”

While the Extraordinary team worked on the circuits, for industrial design they turned to Tony Kearney and Max Dickison in a company called Design Makers — the ‘dm’ of the early Halcro amps. In the very first issue of Melbourne-based design magazine Curve in 2002, Tony and Max described their first encounter with Halcro.

“We sat quietly,” they remembered, “as we were introduced to three plastic milk crates, each wired to the next and all crammed with assorted electronic components. Bruce calmly looked us in the eye and announced, ‘You are looking at the world’s most advanced amplifier’. ”

Lance remembers going to Las Vegas on a research trip with Max from ‘DM’.

“Before they did anything, we spent three days running around CES looking
at what everybody else was doing, mainly the things that we didn’t want to do,” he says. “We wanted something that didn’t look like any other amplifier, we didn’t want anybody to see any of the screws that hold it together, and a few other things. We wanted it to take up minimum floor space, so that’s why it went vertical.”

And is the ‘H’ shape a specific echo of the Halcro name?

“No, just an accident,” he says. “It was all driven by Bruce’s instructions that this must be close to that, but very, very far away from this! It was really hard to
meet all his design requirements. So it’s definitely form follows function.”

As for the secrets within the circuitry, Bruce Candy was, from the very outset, shy about providing too much detail, a habit which has been firmly adopted by the current team. Our request to describe Halcro’s power amplification in as much detail as possible brought only a response of “We make quiet things louder”, along with mention of Arthur C. Clark’s ‘third law’ that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

When pushed, Lance described it as reasonably “highly-biased AB, but other than that, there’s a dozen different things in there that nobody else pays attention to. There are some very complex concepts, and there are some very simple concepts, and it’s really the sum of the parts delivering more than each of them individually. We can’t say too much because some of the things will lead you to other interpretations which might give away too much.”

But before the legendary dm58 and dm68 were revealed to the world, there was a false start: the dm44, which was given an outing at CES Las Vegas in 1999.

“The amp first went to CES as the ‘dm44’, “ confirms Lance. “I think that was the first time anybody outside of the company had actually seen or heard it. I remember building the prototypes to go to CES that first time, and they had to leave on New Year’s Day or some such deadline, and then the night before we managed to blow one of them up. I ended up having the amps in the back of my car, driving them to the airport five minutes before the plane took off, that sort of thing.”

But there was another problem with the new amplifier: its name.

“We discovered that the number 44 is considered very unlucky in some cultures,” remembers Lance.

He’s not wrong; in Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, and Korean, the word for the number four sounds almost identical to the word for death. High-rise buildings, hotels, and hospitals routinely skip any floor containing a 4.

“This led to the amp being renamed as the dm58,” says Lance. “Bruce then upped the power a bit and added the fourth input to make the dm68 shortly afterwards. Two models are better than one from a marketing perspective, so power and other adjustments were made to create the second one.”

So the amplifiers had had, effectively, a four-year development period.

“There were quite a few revisions along the way,” remembers Lance. “It takes a while to get something that good!”

CES Las Vegas 2001

With the amplifiers renamed and their development complete, next came the big Las Vegas launch at CES 2001, the amplifier’s legendary launch.

The dm58 and dm68 were indeed clearly as different to everything else on the inside as Design Makers had made them on the outside. In conversation with Jon Iverson of Stereophile, Candy himself said that “there is not even a small bit of the Halcro circuitry that is at all similar to the conventional low-distortion high-quality circuits... I don’t think any designer would guess that the parts list, if seen in isolation, was of an amplifier.”

Such parts reportedly included an 18GHz-bandwidth transistor for a microwave circuit, as noted by Isao Shibazaki in his report on the dm68 following 2001’s Tokyo International Audio Show. Shibazaki made as close a description of the amplification as anyone has managed, noting that while minor-loop negative feedback is applied, overall negative feedback is not applied. He notes the output stage as having six MOSFET pairs in parallel at the output stage, confirmed as running in “Class-AB close to Class-A model without complementary turn-off operation”.

In a later dm38 review by John Atkinson, Candy confirmed that key to the design is distortion-cancelling circuitry which ‘floats’ up and down with the output stage. Even though the output-stage voltage rails are conventionally high, this rail-tracking circuitry ‘sees’ only around 10V, allowing the use of very wide-bandwidth small-signal devices in the error-cancelling circuitry.

“This is all classical microwave stuff,” Candy explained to Atkinson back then, although Atkinson seemed largely as non-plussed as we remain today (although see our ‘best guess’ panel below).

The reaction at the show was excellent, yet also controversial, especiallly the claims that Halcro was making for its amplifiers’ performance. In an article after the show headlined “Australia’s Halcro Has Some Explaining To Do”, Iverson wrote that “What has raised the eyebrows of the audio community is a bold claim that it is ‘the only amplifier in the world to challenge a theoretical limit’. That limit is the specification for harmonic and IM distortion, which the company claims to have virtually eliminated via its circuitry, whose design is a closely-guarded secret. Halcro says that its dm 68 “produces less than 25 parts per billion harmonic distortion at 1kHz, and the worst result is about 600 parts per billion at 20kHz at full power, a frequency where most amplifiers exhibit very poor behaviour.”

Such great claims coupled with secrecy as to how things are achieved inevitably represented a red flag to reviewers, so it would be the subsequent reviews and measurements that might make or break public opinion on these upstart Australian amplifiers.

And this is perhaps the most famous part of the Halcro story — the dm58 review by Paul Bolin, with measurements by John Atkinson, appeared in the October 2002 issue of the US-based Stereophile, along with a front cover proclaiming it as ‘The Best Amplifier Ever’. Even by modern reviewing standards, the reviewing comments were impossibly positive.

“The revolution has arrived,” wrote Bolin. “My reaction… utter disbelief… dynamic performance that mere mortal amps cannot manage… transcendently neutral… detail retrieval bordered on the supernatural…”

Even more astounding were John Atkinson’s measurements, which confirmed Halcro’s controversial claims.

“Halcro’s dm58 offers astonishing measured performance for an amplifier,” he concluded, having noted that “THD+noise percentage at 157W into 8 ohms… is 0.0006% or less across most of the band, rising very slightly above 10kHz. I can’t
swear to the accuracy of this figure, however; even at this high power, the Halcro’s intrinsic distortion level appears to be of the same order as the output of the Audio Precision System One signal generator!”

In other words, exactly as Candy had claimed, Halcro had the only amplifier in the world to challenge theoretical limits.

The forward path

For those who know only the dm58, dm68 and successor amplifiers, the breadth of Halcro’s full range may surprise. Even when reporting that first Las Vegas launch, Iverson had mentioned that new products for 2001 would include a dm38 stereo amp and a dm33 three-channel amplifier, with a six-channel amplifier to follow, “in a more conventional case”.

Indeed there were soon two Halcro ‘divisions’: Halcro Reference for the amplifiers, and Halcro Logic, under which were launched a series of multi-channel amplifiers: a two-channel mc20, three-channel mc30, 5-channel mc50, 7-channel mc70... but also a video processor and a DVD player.

AUSTRALIAN HI-FI: So after Vegas, you’re putting more products together as original Halcro. What was the goal of the company when you’re getting into video processing and multi-channel amps, beyond just hi-fi?

LANCE HEWITT: We were making the power amps, and then the pre-amp was next, I think [the dm8 & dm10 preamps appeared in 2002]. But someone did a marketing report, or they saw a marketing report, saying home theatre is the big booming market for audio. So if we get 1% of this million-dollar market, we’ll all be rich — that was the thought, to go where the market was supposed to be expanding. That was where the Class-D Lyrus module came in, and the video processor, the Logic SSP, designed for us by a company in Finland — when they work, they’re fantastic — and eventually the DVD player.

MIKE KIRKHAM: That was an SACD player that also did DVDs, the EC 800. We’ve still got a few for sale, and people love them; they were a beautifully-made product. It was a Swiss-made SACD transport…

LH: It was German. Well, I think so. It’s a German-modified transport.

MK: And a really good-sounding player even by today’s standards.

AHF: When you say you’re still selling a few, have you got still stores of this stuff?

MK: We’ve still got a few bits and pieces lying around. When we bought the
company, we inherited a lot of stock, and we funded the first couple of years of our existence selling especially the pallet-loads of those multichannel amps. Those were based around Halcro’s own proprietary Class-D, we call it Lyrus. Audiophiles love them. It was an early Class D that doesn’t sound like anyone else’s; it’s not bandwidth limited, is that right?

LH: Well it is a bit, they all are. It’s more linear than any other Class-D.

MK: It’s quite a musical sound. In the early reports in Stereophile of the Lyrus amps, I think Art Dudley described it as the closest he’d heard to a tube amplifier from a solid-state, and that’s just because the distortion was vanishingly low on it.

In that 2006 mc20 review, Dudley also usefully details Lyrus as achieving low
distortion through a distortion cancellation method called ‘carrier-symmetry modulation’, a circuit that actively modulates the carrier wave and corrects its symmetry during amplification. A relevant Candy patent filed in 2004 describes this correction as altering the slopes of the triangular-wave carrier reference signal, the peaks of which track any difference in potential between power supply rails which supply the output switching stage. (A separate patent describes the switching semi-conductors being connected to at least a first power supply voltage node and a second power supply node, with distortion reduction also achieved by damping between these nodes using, for example, a low-inductance damping snubber circuit with a first resistor in series with a second capacitor connected via a low inductance path between the power supplies.) Such are perhaps some of the secrets of Lyrus…

In the same year Halcro’s Reference division replaced the dm58 and dm68 with the new flagship dm78 and dm88.

But then in 2008, Minelab was purchased by Codan, a South Australian communications company, then best known for HF radio. Codan’s first major product in the 1960s had been an HF radio transceiver for the outback School of the Air network, while it had moved into military technologies after its ASX listing in 2003. Minelab and Candy’s expertise were a perfect fit for Codan.

But an audio company was not. Codan announced that Halcro (aka Extraordinary Technology) was not part of the acquisition.

AUSTRALIAN Hi-FI: When Minelab was sold, did Halcro just stop dead? That must have been very disappointing.

LANCE HEWITT: It was a bit. Codan saw the profit in the metal detection aspect of Minelab, because it was going gangbusters. But they didn’t see any need for the audio part, the Halcro business. So it just got put to sleep; they just turned it off. We did try on our own for a little while; we tried along with some ex-Minelab lab management, that lasted about a year, but it just didn’t work. Then the business closed and all the stuff was put in storage. For a year or two Philip Guttentag [co-founder and CEO of Vivid Audio in Durban, South Africa] looked at buying the company; we made a few amplifiers in my shed, but eventually Halcro was basically orphaned. It all just sat in a warehouse.

A meeting at Wolfie's

Then comes the second legendary moment: the rebirth of Halcro through a chance conversation in a record shop.

Before retelling this famous anecdote, however, Mike Kirkham wanted to point out a continuity to Halcro which is rarely acknowledged. While production and development may have been mothballed, all of its customers were still being supported continuously — by Lance.

““Lance had the keys to the warehouse,” says Mike, “and any customer or email that came in went straight to Lance.”

Lance was working for a radio equipment company called RFI, doing PCB design and CAD work for them, but if any Halcro needed fixing, Lance was ready.

“No one was left in the lurch,” he says. So every Halcro customer has had continuous support since purchase.

The record store of legend was Wolfie’s Records, in Sterling, in the Adelaide Hills, set up by one Wolfgang Schiblhut, flipping an old butcher’s shop into a record store with some hi-fi on the side. Wolfie’s Records is still going, now relocated to Norwood.

“I’d be there on a Saturday morning because he sold a little bit of Magenta Audio’s tube amps in there, and I’m a massive record collector too, so I’d buy records and started helping him out behind the counter,” remembers Mike. “And one day Wolfie introduced me to Lance…”

“And the reason for that,” interrupts Lance, “is that he had asked me to fix a couple of things in the gear he had, and I knew him because I used to coach his son at soccer. Adelaide’s a very small town!”

“So Wolfie introduced me to Lance,” continues Mike, “and told me that he worked for Halcro. And I said ‘seriously? what’s happening with Halcro?’, because obviously I knew the brand very well. And then Lance said it was all sitting down in a warehouse in Port Adelaide, and did I want to buy it? I rang Peter, I think, on that day; Peter’s very good at honing in on stuff like that and doing deals.”

Peter Foster was already part of Magenta Audio with Mike Kirkham, the pair having started it together in 2010, before which he had also been part owner of Mike’s previous business the Electric Room. That was “the first online pro audio retailer”, Mike says, launched in 2005.

“‘Peter helped me with that as well, mainly because those were the days when it took two days to write code for a checkout, stuff like that. The business went very well for a few years, then everyone came online and it became a race to the bottom, so I said, let’s go back to our main love, hi-fi. And that’s when Magenta Audio started, initially, as a retailer in Adelaide, then I heard about PS Audio and put my hand up to be a distributor. And that very quickly built Magenta; it was a good brand to land at the time.”

PETER FOSTER: Since we’d started Magenta, I’d been back and forward to the US anyway, into Silicon Valley four, five, six times a year, so I took those opportunities to make side visits to PS Audio, for example, and I’d help establish those long-term relationships with suppliers.

“At the time of the Wolfie’s meeting, I was running my own electronics company; we made test and measurement equipment for laboratories — started off building fibre-optic test gear, then expanded into more general electronic test and measurement business. And I was in the process of scaling out of that business, looking for something ‘next’. Halcro came up around 9 to 12 months before I was due to exit. It just seemed the natural thing to do; I’ve pulled apart and rebuilt every amplifier I’ve ever owned, so Halcro just seemed to be the next part of that hobby puzzle for me. “

AUSTRALIAN HI-FI: But you didn’t just roll this into Magenta, you started Longwood Audio as a separate company. Who were you actually buying the Halcro stuff from? Was it still Minelab?

PF: No, from Extraordinary Technologies. When Minelab closed Halcro, they were still separate businesses, so they had closed the door of Extraordinary Technologies. Lance introduced me to the guy who was notionally the CEO of the shell company, and he told me it was worth millions of dollars, and I told him it wasn’t, and eventually we came to a number more to our benefit than his. We bought all the assets, everything that was in the warehouse, all the IP, all the tooling, all the jigs, and all the old stock, some of which was still in America, and we had shipped back to us.

AHF: Was that a big weekend, moving everything out of the warehouse?

PF: It was more than a weekend!

MIKE KIRKHAM: Plus we got a call from some storage company in the US saying ‘you owe us all this money, we’ve been storing your gear’. So we paid the bill, had it all sent in a container; we had no idea what we had until we opened it.

LH: A lot of it wasn’t even our stuff...

MK: It was like cooking stuff, as well. And then we got a call from Paddy in Ireland who used to do servicing for us. He goes, ‘When are you going to collect all your Halcro stuff that was part of Halcro Europe?’ We didn’t know there was any Halcro Europe! So we had all that shipped over as well.

PF: For quite a few years, we called it the gift that kept giving. It meant that we could fund everything up to Eclipse, because we hadn’t released any new products. And it took us seven years to develop Eclipse.

Relaunching Halcro – with a loudspeaker?

AUSTRALIAN HI-FI: What took the time there? You were tweaking up the dm88 as a starting point?

PETER FOSTER: It was part-time work, and we had a bit of a diversion where we developed an electrostatic loudspeaker, which took us an inordinate amount of time, a lot of resources, and in some ways, it’s a little bit of a folly. But a stunning loudspeaker. At the time, you know, loudspeakers weren’t stratospheric prices like they are now, and we couldn’t see how it was going to be practical, because it was very expensive to make, and very large, very heavy. But those things are par for the course now.

MIKE KIRKHAM: So, what happened is Magenta was distributing a product called Soltanus Acoustics out of Serbia. And I’m not a big fan of electrostatics, but these sounded phenomenal, and so we contacted them, and they said that we could build you something significantly bigger than this, and using your power supply technology, this could be quite special.

PF: We set up a spin-off, which had some of the technology in it, and we funded that for a bit to the point where we got this loudspeaker developed, and then, you know, the size and the cost meant that we really needed to focus back on the core business of amplifiers. We might bring it back at some point, but we needed to focus on what the market knew us for, rather than coming back with what would appear to be a disjoint.

MK: Halcro’s coming back to the market building amplifiers, here’s what we did with a loudspeaker. But it was really to grab attention. We had it in the foyer at one of the Melbourne shows. Not with the intention of releasing the loudspeaker then, but that we may do it at some point.

Building new amplifiers

AUSTRALIAN Hi-FI: So back on the amplifiers, how hard was that to redefine Halcro with the Eclipse? What problems did you have?

MIKE KIRKHAM: It’s a complete reinvention, really. Every circuit’s been upgraded and quite a few of the circuits have changed. Everything got inspected, put under the microscope and we can change this, upgrade that. And so, you know, while the underlying topology is similar, it is actually quite a dramatic shift, and that’s something I think we have been very good at educating the market about. I mean, I love the dm88 and I love the early amps, but there’s an expressive musicality now to the Eclipse, a vitality to the sound now that wasn’t there before, and that’s partly that every element was looked into in great detail, and partly the input stage.

LANCE HEWITT: Bruce provided a new input stage circuit, though it didn’t work, the first one, so there was a bit of time going through that, working out why, and then coming out with the ultimate design that we had.

MK: So Lance used to wheel it over to my place, as I have the listening room here, and he’d say, ‘I made this change’, and I’d go, ‘yeah, you know, still not doing it for me, it still sounds like an 88’. But when he had worked on this input stage with Bruce, he wheeled the thing over and it was just mindbogglingly good. It was so musically expressive. I think I rang him up at 10 o’clock at night, then I rang Peter at 11, saying you’ve got to hear this. This is a big, big shift.

LH: It was a completely new topology. And what was learnt developing that
input stage has found its way into the pre-amp. So the Equinox pre-amp is based on the new circuit that went into the Eclipse.

AHF: The US was a big market for OG Halcro; are you attempting to rebuild that?

PETER FOSTER: It was historically the biggest market for Halcro, but we haven’t really reached the US market with the new products yet. Europe has actually been a big, big market for us, and Asia is really opening up and waking up to the product.

MK: One of the reasons for the US, in fact probably all markets, is that a lot of people have said customers don’t want to buy a power amp, they want a power amp and a matching preamp, which we now have in the Equinox, which is getting fantastic reviews; it’s an outstanding pre-amp. Lance has done an amazing job on that, and the word’s getting out there about it.

PF: And we’ve had early commitments on the integrated, so I think when we do get to the point of showing the integrated publicly, we’re going to have a reasonably strong order book at that point.

A new integrated...

AUSTRALIAN HI-FI: You mention the new integrated, what can you tell us about that? Is it the same form of amplification as used in the power amps?

MIKE KIRKHAM: It’s almost the audio stage of an Eclipse.

PETER FOSTER: It’s not. It’s similar to Eclipse, a similar structure.

MK: It’s some of the same proprietary design of the Eclipse, with a scaled down version of an Equinox, probably with a different type of power supply, we’re still experimenting with that. But we’re close to drawing a line under the electronics and should be close to drawing a line under the look as well.

PF: Always notoriously our difficult component [the others laugh].

MK: That’s been our problem all along. The electronics, relatively simple. You know, the hard bit is simple for us. And the ‘easy’ bit of building the box is the hard bit. Because we can’t agree on what it should look like.

LANCE HEWITT: You have no idea how hard the finish is; the painting, for example, is stupidly difficult. Just the finish.

MK: The Eclipse chassis was completely changed from the dm Halcros, that made a difference, in getting rid of the ‘ring’.

PF: And one of the things that I think we’re finding out, our approach to the industrial design, it’s beautiful in its own right. Let’s evolve the design. Let’s make it more robust. Let’s, you know, improve resonances in the chassis and all of those things, but let’s bring what is a dated design and make it modern and fresh.

So the next generation of amplifiers are going to be moving down the design language of the Equinox. The Equinox was always designed to be a bridge between the Halcro design language of the past, with that ellipse cut through the top, but also bridging with where we go next. And I think where we go next is going to be quite interesting. We’re going for an understated classic yet progressive, a departure from that classic pillar structure in the past. That product will still be there, but where we’re going is something more conventional in footprint.

MK: I’m really loving the look of the new amp. That’s where we get it right. We are absolute perfectionists. We want it to look incredible, to be distinguishable and iconic. We want it to sound phenomenal, which it does ­— I can testify to that because I’ve been living with a prototype now for quite some time.

AHF: Does Lance still come with a milk crate full of stuff and say ‘I’ve got this far’?

LH: It’s not quite a milk crate any more! We’ve got some metalwork to put it in. But yeah, I put together the circuit and obviously I measure it, then, yes, it’s ‘listen to this, see what you think’...

PF: So the integrated amplifier is coming, and we expect it to be right at the pinnacle of amplifiers. It’s going to be at a more affordable price range than our current products...

MK: Our goal is to be able to have a working version to launch at next Axpona next April. Whether that happens or not.. but that’s what we’re aiming for.

And there's more...

The new integrated is clearly top of mind. But before that, Halcro has something for existing customers — a newly available upgrade, which will be known as Orbit.

“This is an evolution of the DMs developed from the breakthrough precision input stage at the heart of the Eclipse preamplifier,” explains Mike Kirkham. “This breakthrough circuit architecture lies at the heart of what makes Eclipse so special, and DM owners can now upgrade their amplifiers with this core Eclipse technology, delivering greater precision and improved spatial realism, while preserving the legendary Halcro character. It’s an even closer connection to the original musical performance.”

So upgraded original ‘dm’ amps, and a new integrated on the way. But what of the Lyrus Class-D module? Lyrus has never really seen the light of day for modern Halcro, although it is used in Kyron Audio’s top flagship system.

For Halcro, it’s remarkable to keep such a technology sitting in a back pocket indefinitely. Lance does admit that, “We had a few replacement multichannel products sort of half-designed. But we never finished one, I think mainly because we couldn’t decide on how it looked...”

A two-channel Lyrus integrated amplifier might now be more likely than a return to multichannel. And there’s always that giant electrostatic speaker might yet re-emerge from Halcro’s back room. But not in any rush.

“We’ve done it all at our own pace,” says Mike Kirkham. “Initially it was taken on as a little bit of a hobby, so that was the decision that Peter and I made very early on. It’s been a slow build...”