Lavry Engineering - Company Profile

Lavry Engineering, located in Poulsbo, Washington, was founded in 1993. The company specializes in products designed to satisfy the growing demand for hi-res digital audio performance.

Dan Lavry

I first became interested in electronics for audio in the mid 80’s. My previous work as a designer goes back to the early 70’s when I began to acquire my basic design skills designing circuits for telephone traffic measurement gear.

During the next few years, I learned high speed digital circuits, wide band precision analog, system architecture and more. It all took place during designs such as:

1. State of the art IC test systems (high speed) for IBM and Toshiba

2. State of the art time interval generator (programmable down to 10ps steps) for Hughes

3. State of the art AD converter (8 bits at 100MHz) for EH research.

As a mature designer, I acquired appreciation for timing accuracy, including jitter issues when designing some specialized pulse generators (tail pulse generators) for physics research labs. I then spent a few years designing super accurate time interval meters for the aviation industry. That project was all about fine timing, clocks and low jitter issues. 

My appreciation for low noise and high dynamic range began during the design of front end amplifiers (gain up to a million). The amplifier project (for Nicollet biomedical) included programmable filters and an isolated AD.

My experience with transformers (magnetic) and power supplies is a result of designing  about a dozen switching supplies for the telecom industry. The work included pioneering contributions in load sharing supplies and early work in low dropout regulators IC.

All of the above prepared me for my work as a designer of AD and DA converters. My designs include an array of AD and DA converters for instrumentation, medical and telecom industries (HP, ITT, ATT, GE, Siemens and more).

With much background in conversion, and much love for music, I got into audio in the early days of digital audio. My first design was an early 16 bit stereo AD’s  and 18 bit DA’s. The early products designed for Analog Solutions were sold to companies such as Ampex, Otari, New England Digital and more.

One of my designs was taken from Analog Solutions by Dick Powerswhen the audio division was closed. He started a company called Ultra Analog that manufactured my DAC module under the name DAC D20400. This device was sold to OEMs Wadia, Pacific Microsonics, Mark Levinson and others.

I started looking into various types of dither during design of a stand alone AD box for Dorian Recording, a design collaboration with Vince Capizzo. Vince designed the digital section, and I supplied the AD. At the time, Apogee Electronics was a filters only manufacturer, and we used them in the front end. Another project with Vince, utilizing Apogee supplied filters (designed by Christof Heidelberg,) was a design of a multi channel DA system for the first digital sound on film system Kodak Cinema Digital Sound.

Bruce Jackson of Apogee Electronics became aware of the fact that the new over sampling and up sampling concepts will soon make their filters obsolete so I agreed to join them as a partner and steer them into the conversion business. I also agreed to include my share of an ongoing dither research as part of the deal.  I designed the electronics for the first Apogee AD-500 and DA1000 and contributed nearly 2 years into the dither project with my mathematician friend (at the time) Jerry Goodwin. I will do all of my legal paperwork in the future. No partnership but they got all of my designs.

For the last 14 years I have been designing conversion equipment for my company. The company name, dB technologies, was changed in 2002  to Lavry Engineering (the dB Technologies name was sold to an Italian speaker company). I make AD’s, DA’s, sample rate converters, a newer and much improved dither based upon an entirely new and more modern technological concept (my ABC Accoustic Bit Correction), microphone preamplifiers and more.

My products incorporate many proprietary and innovative features, ranging from acoustic bit correction (the best dither) to Crystal lock (the best jitter reduction), to ground breaking performance and unique architecture and circuitry. The Gold series converters are used used by many major mastering and recording facilities and engineers. The introduction of the lower cost configurable units (from stereo to multi channel) Lavryblue conversion and LavryBlack products, makes Lavry quality products accessible to larger number of users. My favorite design remains my Gold DA924