About Us
I am Gordon Brown and together with my brother John Brown we run ECdesigns.
We grew up with music of our father’s piano and our mother’s accordion in the background.
I can remember that John was always tinkering with tube radio’s, TV’s and record-players in our cellar.
John then followed an education in electronics and started work repairing electronic equipment like radio’s, tv’s, video recorders and washing-machines for a local electronics shop. After that he worked as service trainer for a big printer/copier firm in Venlo.
In the mean time I followed the same electronics education as John but my interest was more into computers and micro-controllers.
In 1990 John decided to start his own company, Electronic Custom Designs. He bought, restored and modified a used wave soldering machine and started routing and assembling huge PCB panels used in CNC machine operating panels. He did this for many years.
I started work at a company that sold computers to many local banks, and other local companies. I mainly installed Novell Networks and computers.
Together with John we have also done many interesting projects like e.g. developing an XYZ testing machine for the chip industry (XYZTEC), A data-logger that tracks beer bottling process to check if correct temperatures were reached while cleaning the beer KEGs and then wirelessly read out data and without a computer prints graph on a printer as check(HAFFMANS). We also developed many microcontroller based battery operated magnetic field therapy devices with microcontrollers. Although we have been sceptical about the results, we still managed to sell more than 1000 pcs over the years, so it must have some health benefits ?
Trough the years I have visited countless live concerts in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. I also played in a couple of local music bands and we even did some studio recordings for our own and other bands, and for me hearing live performances was something completely different than listening to music produced by current audio equipment, there was just something missing.
About 18 years ago John also started research into the TDA1541 chip for use in a DAC for many years, and posted his findings in a DIY audio thread.
In 2016 I joined the company with our main focus on building the Ultimate DAC.
Over the last years we developed and sold many DACs, learning and improving the equipment along the way.
Through extensive research we resolved many issues and that finally resulted in the current PowerDAC-X series DACs.
Although the PowerDAC-BX and PowerDAC-RX(V) performance is very good using an external amplifier, with our final product, the PowerDAC-SX that skips the whole analog amplifier and directly drives the speakers using nothing more than a power-supply voltage, resistors and switches, live/studio performance sound reproduction can now finally be achieved.