- Joined
- Jan 6, 2010
- Posts
- 546
- Likes
- 190
Hello, everyone. My name is John, better known as JDS of JDS Labs. Big Jude graciously setup this blog over the weekend to serve as an outlet for my random posts and articles (new and old), which are currently scattered across the audio community.
There's not much audio to see in this post, but for those curious, I'm a 31 year old electrical engineer / founder living outside of St. Louis with my wife and 1 year old daughter. Headphones were a hobby I adopted in 2004. Here's the set of HD-280 Pros that started my insanity:
Said hobby grew severely out of hand in 2007; JDS Labs distracted me from entering graduate school. Instead, I took an engineering job in 2009 and then realized I'd rather be a motivated and creative member of society, rather than bored out of my mind with a consistent source of income. So I resigned. JDS Labs grew into an official corporation with employees and office space in 2011.
Nick and I stumbled our way through business while I cursed the idea of marketing and sales in the early years. We happened to get serious at an opportune time. I wanted to see high performance amplifiers that people like myself could not only afford, but compare based on specifications. NwAvGuy appeared months later, and JDS Labs became the face of the Objective movement. To anyone new to the scene: benchmarks were rare in 2007. Very rare. The push for measurements has helped everyone to better compare amps and DACs, and ultimately led to a price revolution.
Today, JDS Labs is 10 years old, and resides in an 8000 sq. ft. facility, with half the shop dedicated to enclosure machining, and half to electronics assembly and Q/C. Don't think it's been easy! Absolutely not. Manufacturing anything is complex work...
I'm getting off topic. Anyway, I'll get back to audio in the next thread.
There's not much audio to see in this post, but for those curious, I'm a 31 year old electrical engineer / founder living outside of St. Louis with my wife and 1 year old daughter. Headphones were a hobby I adopted in 2004. Here's the set of HD-280 Pros that started my insanity:
Said hobby grew severely out of hand in 2007; JDS Labs distracted me from entering graduate school. Instead, I took an engineering job in 2009 and then realized I'd rather be a motivated and creative member of society, rather than bored out of my mind with a consistent source of income. So I resigned. JDS Labs grew into an official corporation with employees and office space in 2011.
Nick and I stumbled our way through business while I cursed the idea of marketing and sales in the early years. We happened to get serious at an opportune time. I wanted to see high performance amplifiers that people like myself could not only afford, but compare based on specifications. NwAvGuy appeared months later, and JDS Labs became the face of the Objective movement. To anyone new to the scene: benchmarks were rare in 2007. Very rare. The push for measurements has helped everyone to better compare amps and DACs, and ultimately led to a price revolution.
Today, JDS Labs is 10 years old, and resides in an 8000 sq. ft. facility, with half the shop dedicated to enclosure machining, and half to electronics assembly and Q/C. Don't think it's been easy! Absolutely not. Manufacturing anything is complex work...
I'm getting off topic. Anyway, I'll get back to audio in the next thread.
