Welcome to Empirical Design


Perspective

I founded Empirical Design in 1993 with the goal of developing leading-edge audio and video products in accordance with a few time-honored principles:
  • Everything matters.
  • There's more than one way to accomplish a task.
  • Do it as simply as possible, but no simpler.
  • Don't miss the forest for the trees.
I thought long and hard about the name to give my fledgling company. I selected Empirical Design, as a succinct statement of my carefully considered approach to product development. The high-end audio landscape offers abundant diversity; there's no need for yet another me-too product line. Thus I resolved to abide by one fundamental guiding principle: Empirical Design will introduce a new product only when I am confident that it has achieved a level of performance and value unavailable elsewhere in the marketplace.

Priorities

In keeping with my aesthetic preference for simple, elegant solutions to technical problems, I try to avoid boutique parts and unnecessarily complex topologies. I prefer to use quality, cost-effective components in minimalist configurations that deliver standard-setting performance at rational prices.

The ultimate goal of a well-designed audio system should be to get out of the way of the music. Empirical Design products will enhance your ability to selectively attend to individual musical lines (the "trees") without obscuring the rhythmic, harmonic, and textural structure of the composition itself (the "forest"). They will convey the rich tonal complexities of the most intricate arrangements, or the long flowing melody of a delicate solo, while revealing the subtle expressive nuances of each performer responding to the call of the music, from quiet to loud, from high to low.

Thanks for visiting,

Karl Schuster
President