Shaping sound nirvana.
Music is the ultimate art form. In all its beautiful ways of expressing the human soul, music deserves the best and most authentic way of reproduction. It needs to be heard. That’s why KAD wants to expand the horizon of what it means to experience music. The purity of the soul needs to be preserved in our technology and left untouched when reproduced. We are determined to contribute to shaping sound nirvana.
Deliver the legacy of music
to the next generation.
Timeless messages filled with emotion. The pure soul of people is poured into a mystical song. That is the essence of good music. Many artists go through their creative life and leave a discography filled with their entire being. They give everything. This purity of the human soul is an essence worth preserving. It has the power to bring people together and ignite the inner fire of creation. Music has the power to inspire future generations as it transforms and alters along the way. To do it yourself or to listen to others.
Origins
KAD Audio
Handcrafted in the Netherlands since 2019
Kaempfer Audio Design was founded in 2019 by Ernest Kaempfer. After having spent over 30 years in High Tech Telecom engineering and business development he finally saw an opportunity to fulfill his lifelong dream. KAD Audio was born with the love for purity of music, but to Ernest the way to nirvana is more interesting than nirvana itself.
About Ernest
“I started as a product development engineer at the R&D department of Philips Telecom Industries in Holland around 1982. Our team designed/developed all sorts of equipment for Telecom Networks that were sold worldwide. My first project fresh out of school was a new design of a PLL-based high-speed digital clock/data recovery circuit for Philips’ first optical network transmission system running at 565 Mbit/s. Clock/Data recovery is one of the most essential functions in digital signal processing chains, tasked to recognize and restore every individual bit in the received transmission stream, and ultimately responsible for the amount of jitter-related errors produced in subsequent digital to analog conversion. Jitter is a digital-related timing anomaly that causes noise in analog signals.
At AT&T Bell Labs and Lucent Technologies, I learned about professional requirements and product reliability for the optical backbone of Telecom Networks that must be operational 24/7 at a lifespan of 15 years minimum. Unbelievable low failure rates were demanded in those days. One of the reasons was that Telecom Networks before “the Internet” predominantly carried circuit-switched voice traffic, which was highly susceptible to network and switch failures. Today we have a packet-based voice (in fact anything) over IP, and customer demand for quality may have dropped already since the introduction of the first cell phone when connectivity was deemed more important than the actual voice quality itself.
I developed a fascination for technology of all sorts, especially the hardware side. After working at Intel Corporation for the last 12 years, I discovered the computing and software side of things. It was this major project I started working on that proved transformational for the Telecom Industry when we proposed to use standard computing and storage technologies as a revolutionary way of building cheaper Telecom and Internet infrastructures. The first Software Defined Networks were demonstrated, and all sorts of Network Functions are successfully running in software on standard computers, then servers, and later even data center-based Telco clouds.
I guess, my passion for music and my fascination to build stuff that tries to reproduce the purity of sound, originates from my early years growing up, with a loving mother studying 6 hours per day as a concert pianist, a father building model replicas of 17th-century tall ships and a sister playing the violin. After spending my teen years experimenting with various loudspeaker designs, amplifiers, and electronics of all sorts, I was destined to take on a technical study. But I didn’t have a chance to join the audio industry when I started my professional career in the early eighties, I could say I had to pause my ambitions for nearly 40 years or so. Now I am back and more ambitious than ever, developing high-resolution digital active loudspeaker and streaming systems under a brand-new name KAD Audio, and the K7 loudspeaker system is the first innovative result of accumulated knowledge and understanding of what it takes to reproduce the purity of music.”