Atom Amp has been an enormous success in its first 11 months, with around 7000 amplifiers in the wild, and thousands more in production. At this rate, Atom Amp is on track to exceed 8 years worth of Objective2s in just 18 months. We are full of gratitude to have so much community support! Thank […]
Category: Behind the Scenes

More Custom Engravings – 2018
Custom engravings have been a free option with any new JDS Labs amp/DAC/preamp purchase for years, and we have had a fantastic time seeing customer submissions. We first demonstrated the engraving process almost four years ago. Little in our process has changed, while the JDS Labs amplifier and DAC lineup has evolved, so some of […]
Custom Engraving Examples
Custom engraving is free with any new JDS Labs amplifier or DAC ordered through jdslabs.com. It’s a fun process, both for us, and for you. When you click the “Engrave” button during checkout, our production staff receives and pastes your custom text or image into Adobe Illustrator, then prints to one of our two laser engraving machines. Here’s our […]
Machining an Audio Company
We build amazing headphone amplifiers and DACs. Obviously, this niche market appeals to owners of nice headphones. More interesting is a look at Google Trends for the search phrase “headphones”: It’s clear that headphone popularity has grown in the past 3-4 years (and the average consumer searches for Beats by Dre…). Easy to explain is the annual […]
How to Finish Aluminum
Disclaimer: This article has no audio related content. We hope the following manufacturing information will be useful to others. A couple years ago, we naively expected that aluminum manufactures would perfectly interpret our engineering drawings and produce beautiful, black parts. After rejecting 4500+ aluminum cases in these past two years, I can tell you with certainty that this […]
Happy 2013!
Happy New Year, everyone! 2012 was by far our best year ever, at 430% revenue growth over last year. Incredible! No surprise to us, “Erik” at Headfonia.com named the O2+ODAC combo his personal Product of the Year: “I have heard and seen more gear in 2012 than in all the years before combined. For me, the […]
Endplate Experiments & RCA Jacks for ODAC
** Scheduled Maintenance: We’re moving our server tomorrow night at 1:00AM CST, Saturday, July 14th. Anticipated downtime is 1-4 hours. JDSLabs.com may be difficult to access in some parts of the world for the next 24-48 hours while our new IP address propagates. ** CNC Experiments Nick has spent the past three weeks making noise, breaking […]
Setting Up Shop
Each Friday I realize how much we’ve accomplished over the week, and wish I had more time to share the news. This entire month has been huge. In trusty bullet point format, we’ve recently: Moved into a new 900 sq. ft. office in Glen Carbon, IL Shipped several hundred ODAC preorders Hired ‘Jimmy’, a new […]
Preparing for May – ODAC and New Office
ODAC Progress Those seeking to retrofit their O2’s with an ODAC can now preorder the O2+ODAC rear endplate for the Box B2-080 enclosure: Not sure why this rendering is so dark (Nick?!). They’ll match our O2 Front Plates. We’ve switched to a specialty machine shop based in Silicon Valley. Artwork on new endplates will be […]
A Busy Start
This won’t be a typical post. There’s nothing new to see here, just a reflection of our progress. We posted a short year end summary after 2010, at which time I drafted a few goals for 2011. The year turned out nothing like I’d planned…