About Us

Being based in the foothills of Boulder, CO allows us to be surrounded by both the beautiful outdoors and excellent live music throughout the year. From giant summertime concerts at Red Rocks, the Rocky Grass Music Festival in Lyons, boot-stomping at the Gold Hill Inn, or any of the hundreds of other smaller music venues, there's always something excellent to listen to. Unfortunately, as with most people, life gets busy and its hard to make it out as much as we want. That's what initially led to what can only be called the "audiophile bug".

Over many years, the home system developed and improved. I was fortunate enough to know several other similar minded folks who had been in the audiophile world for decades and could let me audition lots of high end equipment. My first experience listening to a tube amp was breathtaking, I knew I needed to have them. The set that I had listened to were home-built ~250wpc amps utilizing a pair of 805 tubes running through a pair of ADS 2030 speakers. I dabbled for years after that with my own system, slowly upgrading tube amps, but never coming close to that shear presence and immersive feeling. I started to realize that there just really wasn't anything on the market that could touch them. Sure, you could find some old high end vintage equipment that could possibly come close or match it, but as I found out time and time again, its a gamble as to how long it will be before some component dies and the entire rig needs serviced again. And to get into that 200+ wpc with a vintage tube amp, you're paying an extraordinary amount for a well used piece of equipment.

That's when I began looking into building something from the ground up with a truly awesome amount of power capability. Luckily, I knew someone who had been building some of the most exquisite sounding tube amplifiers I had ever heard, and had been at it since the 70's. Combine that with my mechanical design and engineering background, it was a recipe for success. After two years of prototyping, revising, listening, prototyping again, the SLAM-225 (SugarLoaf Audio - Mono 225 watts) was born.